


The End

by Entomancy



Series: The End [1]
Category: Yogscast
Genre: Gen, Tekkit, Tekkit rebirth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-22
Updated: 2013-02-25
Packaged: 2017-12-03 05:57:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 34,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/694934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Entomancy/pseuds/Entomancy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something has gone horribly wrong with the world. Finding out what will be difficult, fixing it even harder; but first, they have to survive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

When the end came, it came in silence.

It was the absence that she noticed first. Strange the loss of sound could be so loud, the sudden weight of nothing filling the ears as mere vibrations never could. Lomadia hesitated, frowning, as cessation poured down, the empty air settling down around her like falling ash. She had been working by the base of one of Owl Island's towering trees, carefully adjusting some of the hidden wiring bundles that coiled its way deep into the earth beneath, down through soil and stone to her workrooms. It was never _noisy_ here, deep in the humus-scented twilight at the feet of the trees, but still unseen creatures rustled in the leaf-litter, insects hummed as they darted a frantic ballet in the few falling sunbeams that made it this far, and always the distant sound of the owls – the island's signature symphony – filtered down.

Even the owls had gone quiet now, and the realisation sent a ripple of unease through her as she stood up, laying aside the tools of her task, and retrieved her sword from a nook in a nearby tree root. The weight of it was a little reassuring as she carefully stepped into the air, feeling the faint shiver in her hand as the flight-ring caught into life, detaching her from the immediate attentions of gravity.

If anything, the silence got heavier as she ascended, baring down on her with a pressure that noiselessness simply should not have. She gritted her teeth and renewed the effort, even as the thickened air seemed to drag at her skin, and she was already breathing heavily when the canopy finally broke over her, spilling leaves and fragments of unlucky twigs out into the daylight, and she saw it.

“Bloody _hell!_ ”

\---

When the end came, it came in darkness.

“Dammit Sjin!” The yell was punctuated by the first stage of several loud crashes, as a suddenly-blinded movement dislodged something that sounded mildly structural on one of the upper floors. Each successive clatter got another yell, accompanied almost immediately by a loud protestation of innocence, echoing off each other in the building's peculiarly-sonorous interior into a cacophony of blended indignation. Xephos gave a growl of frustration and let the lid of the chest he was rummaging fall back, unseen, in the sudden blackness that had engulfed the factory. He had become so used to the familiar rows of garish lighting that he had forgotten that this place had no actual windows. There was a chuckle from somewhere else in the main room.

“Not me, this time,” the dwarf sounded oddly pleased with himself, and he heard his friend's metal boots clang against the marble as he stomped over towards the access shaft, and hollered upwards over the sound of the machine wall. “What's he done now?”

Another indignant assertion floated down, but Xephos didn't pay it much heed, as his own attention shifted and he frowned. Questing fingers dug about in his pockets, finding a welcome remnant of habit, and flickering light blossomed around him as he lit the torch and held it up. The small firelight probed under blocky mechanical shapes and knotted pipework, shuddering faintly as the machines rumbled on in their stacked tasks.

The power _was_ on. He leaned back, squinting up through a gloom so heavy it almost had a presence to it, at the hidden rows of lights that should be above him.

“That's... weird,” he said slowly, half to himself, and nearly jumped as Honeydew's boots beat another metallic drumroll across the floor towards him. He turned, and the little sphere of torchlight turned with him, penetrating no more than a few feet into the thick darkness of the factory floor. When the dwarf reached him it was sudden; the shadows seemed to pool and run back across his face, as if he were emerging from some vertical layer of ink to break into the torchlit world. He looked worried, behind the beard.

“What's going on?”

“I don't know, friend.” Xephos raised the torch again, trying to get his bearings. The machine wall was behind him, so the door should be -

There was no light there either. It hadn't even been raining, yet no squares of what should be a midday sun spilled through the narrow factory door. A sudden chill curled its fingers around the base of the spaceman's spine, as he reached behind him for a sword that wasn't there. The compound had been clear of monsters for weeks now, and it had just been one more thing to remember. Now he bitterly wished he had.

“This isn't right...”

\---

When the end came, it came to them all.

The dinosaur in his watchtower, sighting with reptilian patience down a bow adapted for his claws; the lynchpin apprentice, carefully soldering wires even as grass bloomed around her feet. The youths in their forest, carving their own niche beneath the sheltering trees; the railway brothers, peppered with grease and determination; even the bar keepers, reaching with inate publican paranoia for the heavy enforcement beneath their counters. Each one quite different, yet united in the same drawn attention, the same long moment of chill horror as they looked up through pressured silence and diurnally-impossible liquid night. They watched as angular fissures formed between the clouds, and they all heard as the silence broke apart, ruptured anew by an invasive gestalt of ravaged harmonics, and the slender figures began to pour down.

The creatures were familiar enough – often fought, defeated even – _individually_ , but now they ran like oil from the broken sky. Where they landed, where they touched, the land melted away in flashes of mote-dancing purple; hurled aside with the endlessly-repeating ease of the descending swarm, or vanished entirely to leave a nothingness in its place, a fragment of void dark even against the smothering midnight that drained the sky.

They fought, each of them – with sword, and laser, arrow and spear, explosives and frantically-hurled water buckets, and everything between. They fought, because there was nothing else that could be done.

_I thought we had more time._

_I thought_ I _had more time._

_\---_

When the End came, it was his fault.


	2. Frying pans and buckets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Swords, lasers, giant owls and pantless peril.

_Oh god_ .

There were just so many of them. The creatures poured down over the interlaced canopy of the main island, swarming across the network of bridges and platforms that made up the sanctuary's arboreal levels, tearing into the structures as they flickered from one place to the next. The rend in the sky above dripped midnight, casting impossible shadows down over the ever-increasing mass of endermen, but there were other things moving against the darkness too. Huge, feathered shapes detached from the island's nests, orbited by their smaller kin, and swept off into the clearer ocean skies with hooting cries of alarm. A few of the endermen grasped at the owls, but at least the dark-sketched horrors didn't seem to have learned to fly yet, and their snatching limbs fell mostly short.

There was one more pale figure, stark against the seething mass as she skimmed over the canopy, urging the few hesitant birds into the relative safety of the air, and darting in and out of one platform or another just ahead of the shifting figures. Nilesy made a concerted effort not to swallow his own tongue every time the distant figure had to make a sharp turn, or the flash of a blade caught in the remaining sunlight. He had woken when the howling started – the concentrated sound of _far too many_ enderman grating down the ears as if the noise itself were serrated – and scrambled out onto the landing strip just in time to see Lomadia flash past overhead, yelling at him to stay put.

He was very much trying not to think about what was happening. It made no sense, even by the standards _he_ was used to, so he had compromised with his terrified heartbeat by grabbing a weapon and a bucket, and panicking carefully in the faint cover offered by the rubber trees. This was all some kind of mistake. Aye. That seemed... reasonable.

His gaze tracked back upwards, to where the rend in the sky yawned further open, filled edge-to-edge with a texureless blackness. Even the clouds around it were going dark. He jigged on the spot, squinting as he tried to find the flash of silvered armour again against the distant scene. He could only hope it was distant _enough_ -

_...I had te go and think that, didn't I?_

As the sound came, a gulping-creak and the faint _pop_ of displaced air, he was already turning, spinning in place on nerves honed to a temporary razor edge by fear's steel, and swung up automatically. It was possible the creature had been expecting a sword swing, looming at its own arm-length away from him, with those horrible jaws japing open, ready to lunge. It clearly hadn't been expecting to be hit in the mouth by a patented, luxury-special Portable Pool (this week only, extra ten percent off finest accessories; buddy rates available). If it was possible, the twisted face almost look surprised, the moment before the bucket upended and the creature dissolved into a screeching mess of light motes and angles – and was gone.

 _I'm missing a market, here_.

There was a _thump_ behind him, breaking his moment of revere, and Nilesy scrabbled for the fallen handle as he tried to turn and back away at the same time, but this time the sudden figure was a welcome one. Lomadia's face was flushed under her helmet, and her armour bore several strange long marks in the surface of it, as though something had tried to scoop a chunk out of the metal, but she was definitely alive. She glanced at the bucket he was clutching protectively over his chest, and looked puzzled for a moment; then she shook her head, and tapped at the deceptively small alchemical bag that hung from her waist.

“Okay. The owls are gone, and I've got all the coal I can without going downstairs – which is _not_ a good idea, right now.”

“I've...er...” Nilesy hesitated, then rallied. “Held the fort. So to speak. Here.”

The edge of a grin twitched at Lomadia's lips, but it was gone just as fast as she looked back over at the swarming mess that had once been her – their – home, and a stony expression settled onto her face.

“Let's get moving.” She stepped up into the air again, drifting behind him, then slung her arms around his chest, locking her fingers under his ribs. He gripped the bucket again, trying not to blush, as she blew his hair out of her face.

“Okay there?”

“Well, yes – why - ?” his query cut off as his stomach lurched horribly, and he swallowed as yell as they shot up into the clearer sky. The island fell away beneath – _oh my god so much beneath, how is there so much beneath here?_ \- them, and they swerved in the air as Lomadia altered course. The direction might have been familiar, at sea level, but right then Nilesy took as much comfort as could be drawn from squeezing his eyes firmly closed.

“All the coal is like... _all_ the coal, right?” he muttered. Lomadia gave a small, grim laugh.

“It'd better be.”

 _Oh god_.

\---

Another deflating-scream cut through the stilted air, and Sjin winced as he shuffled through another of the big chests, piling aside the accumulated debris of months of sorting. There had always been so many more important things to do than re-jig the sorting facility; he was now wishing he'd been firmer with the suggestion. The damn things must be here somewhere...

“Aww, yeah! Take that, you sonofabitch - ” Another scream echoed, briefly, and died, and Sjin grinned a little Sips' yell. So far, his boss was taking the events better than anyone else; although admittedly it could be difficult to tell exactly what his opinions were at any one time. He was worried – of course – but practical. It was nearly reassuring.

A stack of wires toppled over under his searching fingers, exposing a new strata of items, and he gave a small shout of glee as he finally found what he had been searching for. The rate they seemed to go through mining lasers, while primarily helping out at a cake factory, was ridiculous, but he _knew_ he had tossed the latest ones in here the other week.

“Got 'em, Sips!” he shouted, and yanked the weapons free. His face fell as he saw the power gauges, hardly even glowing in this unnatural night. Barely five percent charge. A curse escaped his lips as he flipped the other weapon over, but it was even more drained.

 _Shit_.

The architect ducked under a tangle of pipes and peered round the door. Sips was still standing at the poolside, lit as clearly as it seemed possible at the moment by the two torches he had wedged into the top of his helmet, their swords in hand. Torchlight pooled around his pale face, and he grinned horribly at the shifting shadows that were thickening around the base of the skyscraper. Sjin looked up again at where the upper floors of the building faded out of even gloomy vision, swallowed entirely by the heavy blackness that had started at the factory and followed them here.

They'd lost track of Xephos and Honeydew in the rolling dark, realising neither one had kept pace with them as they had first burst the edge of the strange night, but that would have to wait. Sjin glanced around quickly, but while the shadows were definitely deepening on the other side of the compound, they were relatively clear here.

“Lasers're out of juice,” he said, quickly. “You okay for another couple of minutes?”

“I'm fine, Sjin,” Sips kicked out, sending a spray of pool water out across the deck, and another bit of shadow slithered away. “I'm fucking _fantastic_. Juice those mothers up.” There was strain under his voice, but neither of them were about to admit that. The power shed was a dark as everywhere else as Sjin darted inside, but he was fairly sure the ceiling of the makeshift room was too low for an enderman to appear inside.

 _Assuming we're got anything like the same rules going on now_.

The charging would be slower in here, but he didn't fancy going as far out into the smothering darkness as the tower of power right now. He shoved more assorted clutter aside and jammed the lasers into place, checking that there was still actual power. There was, and he let out a held breath, placing his hands either side of the faintly-glowing weapons, and tried to draw in a bit of composure. Nearly there. He had his nano-armour, Sips had his – minus pants, _again_ , for the usual unexplainable reasons – and they were almost properly armed. This was okay. This was -

He glanced up, and there was an enderman staring right at him. Its purple-white stare was like a headlight, and his own yelp strangled itself in his throat as the creature surged forward – and stopped, pressed so close to the glass of the small window that its glowing eyes sent strange patterns of refraction down the pane.

 _It can't get in. I'm almost sure it can't get in – and I really, really wish I'd shut the goddamn door_.

He shifted his weight, trying not to visibly move his upper body as he edged one foot sideways, trying to get a toehold on the ominously-gaping doorframe. If he could just – reach the – edge -

The enderman was still watching him, its mouth gaping but oddly soundless, and Sjin made another kick for the door as the creature's arms rose up either side of its face and settled against the glass. He had never really considered whether endermen had hands – it wasn't the kind of thing you worried about, in the grand scheme of things, was it? - but this one did, of a sort. The congealed darkness that made up the flesh stretched out as he watched, forming into smeared tendrils that oozed across the glass surface like questing fingertips.

Sjin's attention flicked, just for a second, towards the rising red glow on the nearest laser, and there was a double-pop of displacing air. Motes of purple light glittered against the glass, but the sound was closer now, and he swiveled in horror as the doorway was suddenly full of strange-angled limbs. The creature was oddly stooped – they didn't bend well, with their angular gait and odd-approximation of a humanoid form – and its half-formed fingers curled into the wood of the doorframe. It was hard to watch exactly, where they pressed, and Sjin found his own gaze sliding away from the point of connection, unable to fix properly, as the enderman began to sink its grip into the doorway.

He groped for the laser, but everything seemed difficult now, as the gimlet-twilight stare pinned him in place, thickening the air in his chest, wrapping his limbs in invisible bindings of bone-deep fears. His fingertips grazed the gun's grip, as the doorway began to creak -

\- and the enderman screamed, as a wet-gleaming blade sliced into the back of its legs, and the spell broke. Sjin shot upright, snatching frantically at the part-charged laser, but the creature shrieked again and vanished into motes as Sips struck another slice down the back of it.

“And fuck you too,” he growled, wafting at the swarming spots of leftover light. He looked up at Sjin, clutching the laser a little more tightly than he might need to, and frowned. “You okay there?”

Sjin swallowed and nodded, angry at himself. It was only a sodding _enderman_ , for fucks' sake, he shouldn't be –

The air shifted. Their gazes locked, for one heartbeat, then a dark-molten hand clasped onto Sips' shoulder and he vanished backward with a yelp, losing grip on one sword that clattered away into the darkness.

“ _Sips!_ ” Sjin lunged forward, ducking as another dissociating grasp swung past above his head, and brought the laser round, firing wildly towards the onrushing shape. The enderman screamed as fire burst into life across its chest, running trails of leaping flames down its twisting limbs, and Sjin barged it aside, searching wildly for another target.

Eyes glittered at every corner of the compound now, chunks of torn stone scattered around the broken paving, but he didn't have attention for that, only for the pair of struggling figures sprawled out on the walkway. The enderman still had a grip around Sips' shoulders, scrabbling at his neck, but he had pulled it down with him and the creature was having some difficulty on the horizontal - and the fact that he was making a good attempt to ram a sword through its face. Sjin sighted along the laser, hesitating as Sips kicked out, knocking the enderman back from his throat – but the creature bent strangely at the elbows, snapping back round so that its rippling hand closed onto Sips' unprotected thigh.

The scream could have stopped his heart. Sjin fired – and fired, and _fired –_ lunging forward, as the enderman vanished in flame and flickering light, the bloody gobbet of torn flesh falling from its fading-out fingers – and his own free hand closed on Sips' shoulder, dragging him back towards the shed. He was still firing into the darkness, as it condensed and flowed towards them in a storm of grasping fingers and brilliant eyes.

And then there was a door, kicked closed behind them, and the flicker of remaining torchlight against the walls. Sjin's heart hammered a dreadful rhythm against his ribs as he ran his free hand down Sips' agony-tensed form, checking desperately even as he hesitated, until his gaze was dragged inexorably down to the ragged hole in his friend's leg. The overlying cloth was already soaked, and Sips clutched around the torn fabric, his face pale even for him.

“Fuck Sjin, _fuck,_ this really - ”

“Don't – I can – I'll - ” words gave out, as he desperately patted his own armour, as if something surgical would magically present itself.

 _They're not supposed to be able to do that_.

Sips fell back again, hissing pain through clenched teeth, and dislodged his last torch; its angled light gleaming on the pooling darkness beneath him. It wasn't the inner thigh, at least, that would have – Sjin cut the thought, shaking himself so violently as he tried to dislodge the macabre chance that he nearly dropped the laser.

_Laser..._

“Hate me later, okay?” he muttered, as he thumbed the laser setting to what he feverishly hoped was the right one, angled it in the cramped space – and fired again. Sips howled again as the burning scent fouled the air, and Sjin wedged himself across his friend's thrashing shape, trying to keep the beam steady through his own whispered string of disjointed apologies.

With a final splutter, the laser ran out, and he hurled it aside. He caught Sips' wrists.

“Sips?”

“- fucking _bastard_ \- ” the man hissed and his eyes inched open, glazed with pain, but seeking Sjin's gaze. “You - ”

“You're not _bleeding_ anymore. Much,” Sjin gulped. He was increasingly-aware of the sound of shifting, groaning stone around them, and an erratic shaking under the floor. Sips tried to lever himself upright, but fell back again with a snarl.

“You were right – about the goddamn – pants,” he managed, and Sjin couldn't suppress a slightly mad giggle.

“Could've been worse.”

“Yeah. There're a... lot of skinny guys out there,” Sips continued, almost conversationally, and Sjin nodded as he tried not to look up at the close-pressed wall of shaking faces around them. Small bits of stone were already falling onto his helmet, and one pane of glass had shattered, too far away to worry about.

“Can you fly?” he asked, dreading the answer. Sips pounded the shaking boards with a clenched fist.

“I don't fucking know. Yeah? Probably? Shittonne more than I can _walk_ right now.”

“Right,” Sjin muttered, as a piece of stone the size of his head was torn free with a screech, just above the intact window. There were long fingers tangled in the door, pulling it back against its hinges. He snatched the other laser – barely half a charge – and stooped down, pulling Sips' arm over his shoulder as he helped his friend upright. They no doubt made a strange tableau, wedged together awkwardly as Sjin tried to take as much of the shorter man's weight as he could and hold the laser steady above him as well. He gritted his teeth.

“Get your ring up.”

“God Sjin, so forward,” Sips grunted, but the hand gripping his waist twitched slightly, and he felt the faint shiver of magical power start up. He took a last, calming breath, and braced himself as he pulled the trigger again. Explosive scatter burst upwards, blowing out the remaining roof in a moment, scattering cracked brickwork and burning pieces of enderman across the crowded compound.

“ _Go_.”

They shot upward, clearing the blasted stone in a storm of gravelly fragments, and Sjin felt something grasp at his boot, dragging down the armour with a feel like serrated static – but then they were free, the sea of glinting eyes and thick shadows dropping away below. Insane exhilaration washed across his mind and he gave a triumphant whoop.

“ _Yeah!_ Take _that_ , mothertruckers!” He fired again, a few times into the dark beneath, but even the glittering stares had vanished now, and he quickly snapped the laser into its clip at his hip. It was _very_ dark up here. He had drawn breath to speak, when Sips lurched awkwardly against him, his grip loosening, and Sjin felt his own flying ring shudder with effort as it took on the extra weight. He turned in the air, swinging his now-free hand under Sips' other shoulder.

“Sips? Hey, stay with me here - ” he shook him, trying to ignore the cold twist in his own stomach as his friend's head lolled back. Flying rings didn't work well when you were unconscious.

 _How much fuel do I have?_ It hadn't been important over at the factory, and he had fallen out of the habit of checking. Sips shivered, and he mumbled something, but it faded again just as fast. Sjin shook him again, to little effect.

“Let's...” he trailed off, looking around, but there was nothing else visible. He had the sudden, horrible feeling that they would just hang there, suspended in this void of thickened shadows, until even the laser's blinking light drained away into nothing...

 _Enough of that._ He shook himself, and re-adjusted his grip on Sips. Medical attention first; existential dread second. “Let's find Lalna. He'll – he'll know what - ”

_What? What to do? What's going on?_

Any of those would be a start. Sjin shifted again, trying to get his bearings, but there was nothing even approaching a landmark visible, and nothing to hear but the distant ripple of ender movement. They had been roughly facing the skyscraper when they launched, so...

It was impossible. They had flown at least as far as it should have taken to find Lalna's castle several times, back-tracking when it became clear there was nothing to find. A few times, Sjin dropped them back down far enough that the ground became gloomily visible again, but the landscape was unfamiliar now, ravaged and torn into uneven hollows by the figures that stalked around the surface. Twice he had had to fire at a sudden mob that appeared out of the stifling night, and the sound of their cries followed him up again, long after the eyes had vanished.

Even with the weight-dispersing effect of the rings, Sips seemed to be getting heavier and heavier in his arms, and less responsive. He was shivering violently now, a bone-deep shaking that Sjin was powerless to stop. How much blood had he lost? Impossible to tell from here; as impossible as navigating in this soup of a sky.

Sjin gave a strangled yell of frustration as they sank down again, faint detail forming below his boots, but one half-stripped hillside looked very much like another, and -

\- there were iron bars there, scattered amongst the smashed remnants of dark bricks, and his heart skipped a beat. The perimeter fence. They had been entirely lost, barely a mile from home.

“Okay,” he breathed, settling Sips carefully against a piece of wall, and tried to get his barings again. It wasn't an _exact_ position, but at least he knew roughly where they were. “Okay. Right. We've got this. We - ” he cut off as he turned back, and saw eyes open in the darkness behind the broken wall, strange-angled limbs folding down towards Sips' prone form. The laser bleeped a warning as he fired, punctuating his own wordless yell of rage, and the last shot fizzled, even as the enderman dissolved into firey nothing. It was as if he had hit a switch, and he dropped the useless gun as more eyes opened, one after another, in the darkness around them.

“This is SipsCo land!” he shouted, madly, as he grabbed Sips again and dragged him back up, pulling the half-conscious figure over his shoulders like a bad rucksack. The flying ring whined, oddly warm under his glove, and he couldn't manage more than a faint bouncing gait, biting down on his lips to try and stifle the terrible insanity of it all. Something glanced off his helmet, pops and creaks of shifting air all around them as the background howling started up again. The men were faster, just, or possibly more erratic, as he half hauled, half carried them both up the uneven hill. Each step was a delay, each a victory, even as he felt the ring finally fail, sparking exhausted magic against his fingers with tiny crackles of cold pain. He stumbled as Sips' full weight came back, knees buckling, as he lurched a few more steps across the torn-open flat of the small hill, then came crashing down in a pile of smashed planking.

_Planks?_

Sjin pulled himself up on his aching elbows and tore at the debris, not quite daring to hope – this could just as easily be rubbish from elsewhere, a final indignity of navigation failure as the blackness closed in around them – and then he found the raised edge of a trapdoor and his heart skipped a beat. Wrenching it open, he grabbed for Sips' again-groaning shape, dragging him towards the little square of more-standard darkness. There was another pop of proximity, and he snatched up a length of broken plank, swinging it round behind him with all the strength he could summon – another croak, another shower of dark-bright motes, and he hauled Sips into the tunnel. Getting them both down a narrow ladder at once wasn't ideal – _what was, right now? -_ but he couldn't reach the trapdoor from here, and grasping, molten hands swung so close over his own head that he winced.

It seemed to be an age before they reached the bottom of the ladder.  He could already hear the sound of shifting earth above them as the creatures tore into the soil. Sweat ran in stinging trails down his face as he pulled Sips' limp arm back over his shoulder again, and tried to shake some sensibility into his partner.

“You gotta walk now, Sips,” he murmured, trying to ignore the sound of ripping stone so close above them, as bits of broken ladder tumbled down into the tunnel. “Just a bit further, I promise.”

Sips mumbled something indecipherable, but managed to tighten his arm around Sjin's shoulders. Every step was accompanied by a dull hiss of pain, and Sjin tried to ignore the little spasms of exhaustion through his own muscles, as they stumbled down the thankfully-narrow rough-cut corridor. It was difficult to hear much over the almost-familiar muffled onslaught of ender voices, but a tiny flower of relief bloomed in his mind, as Sjin finally found the sound he was hoping for. There were probably – definitely – no other circumstances that the guttural susurrus of a nether portal would be _welcome_ , but as they turned a sloping corner and the violet glow spilled down towards them, it couldn't have been more perfect.

“Shiiit - ” Sips looked up, his face hollowed by a grimace and the strange light, as they scrambled up the rough slope towards the portal. “Outta the fucking frying pan much, Sjin?”

“At least it's well-lit, right?” Sjin hauled his partner up in front of the obsidian lip of the gateway, and gritted his teeth as he stared into the shimmering, half-real surface of the portal itself. Into one hell to escape another.

There didn't seem to be any other choice.


	3. Burns night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meanwhile, at the volcano...

It was tricky to control the ambling motion of a mooshroom at the best of times, and today was very far away from that. Zoey had resorted to looping long skeins of the most comfortable string she could find at short notice around the hyphal creatures' necks, tying the knotted ends around her own waist, and tucking wheat into her belt. Not perfect, but at least they couldn't wander off too far and lose themselves in the weird darkness. The wolves were easy enough, trotting along warily at her heels, occasionally growling into the unseen woodlands. The golems didn't seem worried at all by the darkness. Maybe they saw at a different frequency of light, like a robot?

How much like a robot were they? She'd been meaning to try and hook Redfive up to one of her new computers, see if science met magic on any cool footing somewhere in the golem's metal (or possibly pumpkin) skull, but that would have to wait. For now, both hulking figures lumbered ahead of the little group, fists swinging in anticipation, shedding light from the torches she had fixed to their shoulders. She hefted her own pack again, re-arranging it into a more comfortable position. Comfortable for her, anyway; she wasn't quite sure how comfortable mushrooms found anything much, but at least they had some transport this way.

The castle...

She hesitated, and Daisy bumped into her mid-back, making a lazy fungal chomp for the nearest wheat. The castle wasn't secure. Not anymore. She still wasn't totally one-hundred percent sure what was happening – although, she would (of course), just needed a bit more time to get everyone safe first – but the place had been _crawling_ with endermen and the sky was broken, which was crazy. She and Tee had retreated to the roof, where the half-finished new powerflower had still cast some light, but the uninvited slenders had pursued them, dodging Tee's arrows with cheating ease. She had burnt a couple of them, after the first took a long strip of scales off her dinosaur's muzzle, twisting the ignition ring's burst into a narrow coil like she'd been practicing, but there had been no pause, and they seemed to come from _everywhere_.

Then he had reappeared. And then, afterwards, they had to move.

A couple of unearthly screams echoed strangely through the dark trees to her left, and she felt the wolves press a little closer to her, ears flattened back.

“We're clear,” Rythian's voice sounded flat in the dead air, but Zoey's fingers tightened in Willow's fur for a moment as she heard the faint edge of strain under his tones; imperceptible, possibly, to anyone but her. Well, maybe Tee, but the dinosaur was out at the front of the group, a torch in his mouth and Superjim in his claws, and it was always tricky to tell what he thought about anything anyway. Except possibly meat, and sniping.

There was a _whump_ of displacing air behind her and a faint scatter of particles, but a cough immediately afterwards, and she relaxed slightly. Since Rythian had started idly using the void ring around the castle, she had put a new house rule in place: if teleporting to somewhere unexpected, _say so_. After a couple of somewhat awkward incidents after she had got back, and the rule had bottomed out to a slightly nervous cough, and it had kind of stuck.

She was never, ever more glad they had that rule than now.

“You okay?” she asked, mouthing along to the quick 'I'm fine' that followed – honestly, he could be missing a _leg_ and that'd still be the answer – and glanced round. Between the mask and his mop of dark hair, Rythian's actual visible face was down to a stripe of skin surrounding his eyes, which gleamed in the heavy gloom with their own violet light. She told herself that was the mage equivalent of Tee's torch-in-the-mouth.

She told herself a lot of things.

“We're nearly there? Kinda hard to tell back here,” she asked, and Rythian nodded. His glinting gaze was never still, straying across the darkened woodlands around them, as he frowned -

\- and was gone again. Half a moment later another ender-scream rang out, a low-pitched screech like air being torn in half.

“Target Location Within Visual Range.”

“Have to believe you on that, Redfive,” Zoey muttered. She peered around the golem's bulk and her eyes widened. There _was_ light out there, faint, distant, but still the familiar red-gold glow, glittering like a burning ruby in the soupy blackness. Zoey gave a little exclamation and started forwards, only to be pushed back again into the circle of torchlight, as Tee swung his tail gently into her path.

“Oh, fine,” she grumbled, but couldn't help smiling at the upcoming glow. Clever, clever boy! Even in this murk, even with endermen ripping up the landscape – entirely undeterred.

 _Awesome_.

The eclectic group continued on, as the shadows of trees fell away either side and the floor turned to basalt, poured over itself in curling layers, glass-sharp at the edges. Zoey joined Tee at the head of the party, grinning as they made their way up the familiar path – still accompanied by the occasional shriek of dying ender, as Rythian flickered around them – and finally reached the top of the stocky hill. She quickly untied her mooshroom lead and looped it around a narrow outcrop of stone, hoping the rest would be bright enough to stay away from the centre of the crimson glow. Relief bloomed like a new rose as she stepped forward and felt heat on her face, searing drained away to merely warm as the ignition ring shivered into life against her fingers. She stooped down, running her thaumically-shielded hand along the edge of the infant caldera, and made a hushing noise.

“Hey babyJim! Looking good; guess those ender-guys weren't so tough for you, eh?”

Something else died in the background. A few sulfurous bubbles broke the surface, and Zoey nodded.

“Yeah, it's Rythian. Got a real blingin' sword. Between you and me - ” she leaned forward, conspiratorially. “ - I think he's taking all this kinda personally, you know?”

“I _can_ hear you,” the mage's voice broke out of the darkness again, followed a moment later by the man himself, dropping down next to babyJim with his usual liquid grace. Then he stumbled, hissing under his breath, and caught on to the slowly-charring edge of the story chair to steady himself. Zoey scrambled to her feet, and stopped dead when she saw the thin trickles of blood already running down the supportive woodwork.

“Ohmygosh, one _got_ you?” she gasped and grasped his arm, starting to roll back his sleeve.

“No, its – don't - ” he started, making an ineffective attempt to pull free, but she had already dragged the damp fabric away and was staring down at his hand, riveted in place with shock. His arm – partly swathed in thin bandages, as it always seemed to be these days – looked like it had been mauled. Vicious, ragged slashes were regularly sketched through the flesh up to his elbow, angry and bleeding, and the fingers were trembling erratically. They didn't look like the wounds Tee had, the ones the enders made.  Zoey half-made to touch the ravaged limb, stopped, then looked across into Rythian's downcast eyes. Even lidded, they were bright.

“... what have you done to yourself?” The words escaped before she could stop them, laden with the ghosts of a thousand other meanings, and for a moment the mage almost looked smaller, turning his hidden face away towards the blacked-out woodlands.

“There's... always a price, Zoey. For everything. I didn't want to – you aren't - ” he stopped, then jerked away with a speed that startled her. When he spoke next there was steel under his words. “Back to the fire, all of you. _Now_.”

The moment had gone. She wasn't sure whether to be relieved or not.

“Your hand - ”

“Lifestone; it'll heal. _Back_ ,” Rythian growled, drawing his sword again – the new one, the one that gleamed with a cold light that cast all the wrong shadows – and faced the night again. Tee snarled – a low, rolling sound that sent hairs rising on the back of Zoey's neck, and roused a small undulation of ancestral concern from the mooshrooms. The dinosaur was hunched over, braced against the ground in the same direction as Rythian was facing, his tail rigid with tension.

_Oh gosh..._

Zoey stepped back, waving a hopefully-calming hand at babyJim, and searched around, but the night rose up either side like a dome, pressing down on the air until she felt it catch in her throat, and she clenched her fingers, digging the nails into her palms just to focus on something.

When the eyes opened in the darkness, they were ready. They just weren't ready for so _many_.

Rythian gave a small curse and flickered out of sight; a slash of light somewhere in the sudden, onrushing crowd suggested his reappearance. Tee roared as he charged, slicing upwards into the first angular figure's torso, and clamped his jaws around the creature's extended forearm, tearing into the shadow-slick flesh. The enderman broke apart, but there was another in its place instantly, and the golems lumbered forward, swinging their great iron fists with ponderous, elemental force.

Zoey caught the wolves' collars, pulling them back over to the mooshrooms, even as the animals whined and bit at the air, caught between fear and fury.

“Stay here,” she muttered firmly, and turned back, biting her lip. Even now, even with these shadow-stepping horrors, she felt a pang of conscience as she raised her hands, and the now-familiar shimmering corona caught around her fingers.

_Why are you doing this?_

Flames burst across the night, winding around the closest figure in a sheet of abrupt immolation until it collapsed into motes with a dreadful howl. The klein-star prickled against her sternum, paying out power down her arms and into the boiling air around her hands. Another enderman flickered into existence in front of her, shockingly close, and she swallowed a cry as the creature's jaw distended in a reverberating howl. Fire swept out again, but the figure was gone, and she ducked forward as angled arms swiped over her head – before the thing realised it had materialized in the lava that lapped harmlessly at her heels, and snapped away, still burning.

She swept damp hair out of her face, breathing hard, and was in time to see Tee skid backwards, clutching at his chest, where the propelling impact had also taken out a triple-strip of scales like dragging fingermarks. Zoey managed to catch him, knocking the wind from herself as she deflected several hundred pounds of decelerating dinosaur away from the lava pool. He growled, shaking his head from side to side as she tried to examine the wound, and shrugged her off to lurch back, his tail thrashing furiously.

They didn't seem to have made a dent. More shadow-shapes spilled out into the lavalight circle, and Zoey flattened herself against the battered remains of Nilesy's picture wall, trying to catch her breath. Fear was pounding frantically at the sides of her mind, and the collective ender-sounds seemed to fill the world from edge-to-edge. She curled her fingers against the char-pocked wood and squeezed her eyes closed.

_Why are you doing this?_

A new sound caught even her panic-stilted attention and she swung round, claws of pure horror tightening around her as she focused on the scene. One of the golems was surrounded entirely by flickering figures, his head rotating frantically from side to side as the endermen poured in, sinking their molten hands through the angular patterns across his body. He gleamed red, but they both did now – so she couldn't even yell a name as one of the endermen gave a triumphant shiver. It jerked back, tearing a chunk of raw metal out of the shaking figure, to a mechanical screech. The others surged inward, clutching, grasping, and the agonised sounds of tearing iron cut the air like knives.

_Not again._

Zoey threw back her head for the scream – and the picture-wall vanished in a plume of flame as the air ignited around her. She lunged forward, as incandescent as her fury, and slung a hand out towards the ender-crowd. Some of them flickered out, some of them didn't, but she swung her other arm out behind her and hurled power that way too, catching them on the ambush. Fast, or slow – the firestorm roared around her, and all of them _burned_.

How _dare_ they? _How dare they hurt her friend?_

She was dimly aware of other sounds, other movement outside the universe of furnace-heat she wore now, but it didn't matter. The klein-star _was_ a star now, blazing against her skin as the force of it unwound. Once carefully collected, gently drawn from ambient energy, or torn raw from existing firmament, materials reforged and reformed and ripped apart for their flickers of power, all now coiled up into the impossible point of focus that hung about her heart, flooding down her veins in seething rage.

They would all burn. _Everything_ would -

The air shifted, and fingers closed around her wrists. Her head jerked up, her own white-hot gaze suddenly caught against another, a point of calm in the boiling sea; she heard her name, then, as if from far away, as the grip tightened, pulling her in, pulling her _back_.

The fury broke. The fire died, and Zoey slumped forwards as all energy seemed to drain out of her limbs at once. Arms caught her, bracing her upright as the cooling words poured their balm through her seared-out mind – but she couldn't even shout a warning as she saw the eyes open behind them. The approaching creature's mouth dropped open – and then it fell, screeching, as a long metal spike thrust upward through its chest from behind, pinning its jaw back closed, and an explosion of noise tore the shape to motes before it could even move again. That hadn't been her, or him, but she couldn't quite pull together enough effort to worry in the implications.

“Never tell me you can't do magic,” Rythian breathed, carefully unwinding his fingers from around her arms. “We just... need to work on your control. A lot,” he added, as she slumped against him like an unstrung puppet, her eyes sliding closed. Her throat felt ashen, her lips cracked, and there was a pervasive smell of burning hair that she could only hope wasn't ongoing. Rythian ran a hand down her back, then stopped, hesitating as he realised what he was doing, and gave a small cough.

“Are you alright? How do you feel?”

“...cooked,” she muttered, wincing as every word seemed to need more manual assembly than it should. Rythian's masked jaw moved against her hairline, hidden lips twining into a grin.

“Humour. Humour is good. Can you stand?”

She nodded, although it took a few false starts by them both to actually get her onto her feet, and lurch away from the smoking circle of reheated basalt. Her brain, clearly deciding that that had been quite enough time spent in half-boiled fugue, finally delivered a series of realisations. The first of which was that they were not alone – but in a positive way.

“ _Nilesy?_ ”

She stared, momentarily paralyzed with shock, as the thin figure gave her a small wave. His glasses were slightly cracked, his tie askew, but he was grinning, if nervously.

“Er, so, hello again - ”

“Ohmygosh you're okay, you're - ” she darted forward, wincing as each step set off a general round of singed prickling across her skin, then stopped as she noted the other figures also stood in their circle of lavalight. “You're all okay! I don't even know who most of you are but you're okay and -”

She knew she was babbling, but this seemed a reasonable time for it.

Some of the unexpected faces she _did_ know, at least a bit. The armoured woman standing behind Nilesy, he had mentioned her before; and Rythian was already exchanging nods with the next figure in line, a stockier chap in a kilt, with a bloody gash down his right arm. More of them she didn't; the tall man with a spike-ended metal pole slung across his broad shoulders, flanked by his own slighter, greyed double; and a pair of pale young faces at the back of the group.

“I've got to say, you lot are easy to find.”

Zoey blinked. The woman at the fore wasn't one she recognised, but there was... something familiar about her. Ringlets of blonde hair were escaping around the edges of blunt iron headwear, more a pushed-up facemask than a helmet, and the rest of her armour was similarly primitive, incongruously strapped in place over a floral-print dress. There was also a sword at her hip, and a shotgun resting in the crook of her arm.

“This all ye are?” The kilt-wearing man glanced around the group, his gaze straying to the little herd of worried animals, arcing a brow slightly. Zoey ignored that, and nodded.

“I needed to check on babyJim.” It seemed important to point this out.

“Baby...?”

“He's the volcano,” Rythian cut in. He moved forward a little, tension in his stance, and Zoey realised with a start that Tee was growling softly. “Why're you here, Ravs? I'm glad you're alive, but -” he hesitated, shifting his gaze to the blonde woman, who met it coolly. “Not the company I'd expect you in.”

“Beggars be, mate,” Ravs shrugged, then a short grin found his face. “No good landlord's gonna stand by as client base get savaged. Yeh, Minty?”

“Call it common ground,” the woman added. “Truce, maybe.” She was definitely looking at Tee then, although the dinosaur didn't seem mollified, if that was the intention.

 _I'm missing something here_.

There was another set of too-close _pops_ of shifting air, just out of sight. The verbal tension broke as hands went back to weapons, and the varied group looked around warily again. The woman – Minty – pushed a stray piece of hair back into her helmet and shifted her grip on the gun.

“You've not seen anyone else? Here, or -?”

“No.”

“Right. Still Plan B then.” She slung the weapon over her shoulder, and fished around in the chestplate of her armour, extracting a folded piece of paper, which she handed to Ravs. “Lom, still coming? Could use the extra arms.”

“And _where_ -?” Rythian started, his voice laden with suspicion, but Minty had already slung an arm around Lomadia's waist, taking her own weight, and the pair vanished skywards, swallowed in a moment by the darkness.

“She's got her own plan, but we should move.” Ravs held out the paper, unfolded now to reveal a map, and tapped at an area that had been hastily circled. Rythian peered at it, frowning.

“That's... detailed,” he said, flatly, and Zoey followed his glare. Blackrock was clearly marked in the top corner of the paper landscape, and there were a lot of annotations that bore marks of being hastily scribbled over. Some of them had been in rather large letters. Ravs shrugged again, a little apologetically.

“We scouted _them_ enough times, right? I've been here, when I was getting my bearings before.” He gestured to the highlighted area again. “Whole area's old-volcanic, tunnels everywhere. Ye bastards here're got trouble getting a hand on the igneous, so far as I can see. Don't half slow 'em down.”

“I know. I - ” Rythian cut off, and vanished, to a shared murmur of surprise, and Zoey tried not to wince as the sound of dying ender broke the air again. When Rythian reappeared, he was holding his sword-arm close to his side, tensed up again, and there was more strain in his voice.

“It's a better plan than nothing, I suppose. We can't stay _here_ either.”

“Wait - ” she interrupted; a cold knot of dread curled her stomach as the implication lay heavy in the air. “We can't just leave him alone! I mean, he - ” she faltered, trying to remember if she had had a plan after this point. Possibly not. A baby volcano was still a _volcano_. They weren't mobile.

“He'll... be fine, Zoey.” Rythian muttered, a little awkwardly, and she nodded, swallowing the hint of a lump in her throat.

They had to move.

There was a bit of consternation as the newly-extended group reformed again – eventually arranging based on some calibration of whether they seemed more wary of Rythian or Tee – and ventured back into the stifling darkness. As the lava glow sank away behind them, Zoey turned, trying to watch the last flickers of the warm light. The remaining golem lagged a little too, occasionally turning his impassive face a little further round than usual as he lumbered to keep up with the group.

So... Johnnyfive? RedIron?

_We can rebuild him. We have the thaumaturgy_.

“How'd you get out here, anyway?” she asked quietly, if only to break a few edges off the rising silence. Nilsey, walking next to her with his pool bucket held in front of him like a shield, blinked.

“Flying. Into the dark. Which isn't as fun as you'd think, I can tell you.” He shivered and glanced around, as more trees began to loom out of the obsidian night. In the flickering torchlight, each trunk seemed to ripple as it passed through the inky shell around them, and sank away into nothing. “This is... nicer, though,” he added, in a strained conversational tone, a few notes higher than it needed to be. “Everyone fleeing for their lives together. Kinda friendly, if you overlook all the peril.”

Zoey stifled a giggle. It was absurd, but Nilesy's awkward rationalising came close to being reassuring. Buoyed by her reaction, he continued a little louder.

“So, yeah, we sort of collided with Minty and the others. Nice guys, really. Got a promise to go over to - ” he frowned for a second, glancing over the bearded pair at the other side of the group “ - the, er, train bros there, see about a pool. There's squid involved. Each to their own, you know? And the endermen are going the other way, so this seemed - ”

“Wait – what?” Rythian turned so suddenly that Nilesy jumped, sloshing a bit. “What do you mean, 'going the other way'? _I'm_ – ” he stopped, pressing a hand on the handle of the cold-burn sword with a strange expression on what was visible of his face. Nilesy swallowed.

“Well, there's not so many out here. Compared to over there. I mean, they're not friendly, but at least there's less, right?”

Rythian looked as if he had been struck.

“But... that doesn't - ” He cut out again. Today was clearly not a day for finishing sentences. Nilesy coughed nervously.

“Well... no? Anyway!” he turned back to Zoey, changing the topic about as subtly as a hammer-blow. “So, the magic? That's going well? What with all the... fire, and stuff?”

Zoey felt heat rising under her cheeks, and hoped the torchlight would cover it.

“I'm learning. I mean,” she corrected, “Obviously I'm a super-awesome mage and everything, yeah, I've just got a few details to iron out. But I totally got this mastered. Yup.”

 _Sort of_.

“It, uh, looked pretty masterful. Definitely. Difficult stuff.”

Behind them, Rythian gave a small snort of amusement.

“Magic isn't difficult. Being _good_ at it, that's the skill.”

She could feel his gaze on her, and busied herself with checking her mooshroom lead.

“Well, I – er – I've tried my hand. Y'know, the easy bits. Not that I'm devaluing anything you do,” Nilesy added, hurriedly, “I mean, I could get some of it working, but all of _that_? Right over my head, mate, right over.”

Rythian laughed, quietly, and shook his head.

“Like I said. Hell, even _Lalna_ \- ”

He stopped. Entirely; as if he had been frozen in place, so much so that the mooshrooms collided confusedly with his legs. After a few heartbeats, Nilesy leaned forward, politely.

“Even Lalna... what?” he asked, then recoiled as Rythian impaled him on a stare, his eyes suddenly ablaze, and his hand gripped the sword at his hip until little particles of pale light spilled between his fingers. His voice dropped to a monotone snarl.

“Even Lalna can do magic,” he finished. For another long moment, he didn't move, then lurched into the air, his cloak swirling around him in the sudden movement. The group froze, each pair of eyes searching for the sudden threat, but Rythian shook his head as the collective gaze found him, and when he spoke it was through clenched teeth.

“I... have to check something. Don't wait.”

“Rythian, what - ?” Ravs started, but the mage cut him off.

“Keep going. Keep them safe, Tee. I'll - ” he hesitated. The purple-edged stare flicked back to Zoey, and the moment seemed to stretch, until it creaked with the sheer weight of things unspoken.

“I'll come back,” he said, quietly. Then he was gone, in a _crack_ of shifting magic, leaving them all staring at the empty space.

No one spoke. Eventually, the little private universe of torchlight began to move again, hemmed in either side by the forced-midnight gloom. Zoey went with them, feeling as if she wore that last moment twisted around her like a chain, while the same two thoughts burned into her mind. She remembered the things he had said before; she just didn't always  _want_ to.

_But what haven't you told me, Rythian?_

_What have you_ done _?_


	4. Nether say die

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a small detour into hell occurs.

Years ago, Lomadia remembered learning about tar pits. Ancient pools of poisonous oil that seeped up from the earth, smothering any unfortunate creature that lumbered into their cloying grasp, predators and prey alike, and dragging them down into lightless eternity. The current flight was rather like she imagined that would have been – only marginally more unpleasant.

She had to stay low, skimming surface-close to the trees that lurched out of the darkness like they bore her a grudge; get too high, and any chance of logical pathfinding would be gone. Once or twice she had to veer upwards abruptly as grasping hands reached out of the night, and continued forward in a personal universe of smothering darkness for a few stomach-churning moments, until the underneath sounds of ender-movement went away.

The armour-clad Minty was more unwieldy than her previous underslung passenger, making the sudden movements particularly precarious. She was a lot more useful for navigation, however, as she both seemed to know where they were going, and had a compass. The compass did get violently shaken and muttered at a little more often than seemed to be ideal, but Lomadia decided just to focus on not flying into trees.

They couldn't have been moving for that long, even with the occasional detour, but time was slippery in the reference-empty night; so it was a relief when Minty finally nudged her and pointed ahead of them, where a faint edge of different darkness glimmered behind the next trees. Lomadia slowed, carefully, with as much wary scouting as was possible in the restricted vision, and they touched down next to the portal. The surrounding small clearing seemed relatively untouched, and although there were a few chunks missing from the edges of the obsidian frame, it was impossible to tell how recent they were.

Minty peered into the sheet of shifting purple, examining the standalone stone rectangle that encased it.

“Seems okay.” She idly tucked a few more strands of escaping hair back under her helmet. “Ready? We'll not be coming back out this way; all the connections are kind of tangled up right now.”

Lomadia nodded.

“You said. All to the Honeydew portal?”

“Yeah.” She drew her sword, the blade glinting crimson. “If anyone's gone that way, they'll be stuck.”

“Anything to stop _us_ being stuck?”

Minty's grin gleamed in the dull portal light, then vanished as she flipped her visor down firmly.

“Forward planning.” She stepped inside. For a few moments the image of her held out against the dark glow, then flattened and melded in with the swirling patterns, and was gone.

This was all going to end in tears. Lomadia pulled herself up into the portal frame, hesitating, as her fingers hovered over the shifting surface. The idea of escaping from _anything_ , deliberately into the Nether – well, it would certainly have seemed insane yesterday. But now?

She had seen them moving; the corrosive slick of dark figures flowing across the landscape beneath her own initial, desperate flight. Individually erratic but with some overall pattern, a directional drifting like a slowed-down swarm, as they headed... somewhere. She hadn't stayed to find out where, with the congealing darkness at her heels, but she couldn't ignore that while most of the locals had found each other now, even in this tar-soup of impossible night – there were some very conspicuously missing faces.

If there _was_ a chance...

The sensation of passing through a nether portal was something you could never quite get used to. There was an initial prickle of all-over static, then a distinct impression that every fibre of your being had been inescapably grasped and rotated through angles found in no reasonable branch of geometry, until everything blurred into a thick, swirling purple vortex that caught up around – over – through – you and _squeezed._

The boiling air hit her like a wall. Lomadia gasped, taking in a sulfurous lungful that sent her stumbling out of the portal base, doubled over and coughing violently. She caught hold of this side of the frame, hot even through her gauntlets, and leant her helmet against it until the little dancing blue lights went away and she was able to coax some more shallow breaths into her chest.

“Alright there?”

“Ye-es. It's – been a while, ” she managed, and straightened up, blinking madly as her eyes tried to adjust to the sudden influx of furnace-light.

The hellfire landscape was as unwelcoming as ever. Great mountains of cracked stone rose up around them, shadowed in the colours of raw meat and old gore, and wreathed in chains of magma. High above, the slopes melded through one another and into the cavernous roof in a titanic forest of jagged stalactites, each wider than her house. Below, the endless lava lakes spread out into the distance, fed by streams of viscous brilliance pouring from vents in the roof, ending only when the constant smoke became too thick to see through. Between both, twisted towers of obsidian speared up out of the liquid fire, immense spires slung together by thin trails of rock and blackened glass, as if some primaeval architecture had decided to get started of its own accord, right from the molten blood of the earth.

The raw heat was already bordering on intolerable, and they'd only just got here. Lomadia drew her sword again and glanced around warily, but there was no sign of anything other than Nether as far as she could see. There had been expedition debris scattered around the portal mouth last time she _had_ been here, but everything brought in eventually burned away or subsumed into the dreadful rock underneath.

She tried not to consider the implications of that, right now.

They spread out. The portal had formed raised up in the centre of a low plateau, relatively flat compared to the ragged rises around them, and they spiralled out cautiously, searching for any signs of life. The netherrack crunched unpleasantly underfoot, its texture somewhere between sponge and old bones, yielding slightly with each step yet never quite seeming to leave dents. No footprints, no tracks; Lomadia's heart sank steadily as she crept across the faintly-smoking surface, looking for... what? A trail of burning breadcrumbs?

There was nothing here. There was _no one_ here, and even if there were, any hint of them had already been swallowed by the ravenous plane. She reached the edge of the plateau and peered over, her eyes stinging in the sudden thermal wind that raced up the sides of the shallow valley below, and looked down at the base of a massive wall of uneaven rock, rising in huge, cratered ridges until it melded into the roof. Half a dozen or so dark figures moved across the distant floor, but even from here their lurching gait was the unwelcome-kind of familiar, and she aimed a glare at them resentfully, as if some small amount of blame could be affixed to the ruined porcine shapes. They were -

They were moving. Not the aimless wandering more usually seen, and being impeded by their own degraded construction, but there was a _direction_ to it, now – heading for a fold in the huge cliff below, opposite her. If she squinted, the edge of an angular cave mouth was just visible behind the outcrop, particularly if you worked it out from the pigmen's movement.

“Oh, bloody hell,” she muttered. “Minty! Down here!”

She didn't wait for the reply, swinging herself over the edge of the plateau and onto the netherrack scree that sloped down to the valley, presumably from where the old ledge had collapsed. It crunched and skidded erratically under her boots as she half-climbed, half-slid down, struggling to keep her balance and the moving group in sight at the same time. She didn't dare fly; not from that high, with the havoc that this place played with normal magic, and it seemed to take unbearably long before her feet hit more solid ground.

The valley was narrowest at this point, scattered with small pits of licking flames that made ground-level vision less clear than above, but her heart skipped a beat as she caught a flash of green behind the smoke. Nothing was green here. Her fingers tightened, readying the blade as she hurried forward, trying not to breathe as her eyes and nose stung madly in the acrid air. She could hear them now, the squealing yells and grunts – the sound of clashing metal – and a very human yelp of pain.

 _Oh no you don't, son_.

The ring burned against her finger as she gave up on caution, and the magic frantically tried to recalibrate itself to the pressure of this place – but her feet left the ground and stayed up, even as she veered wildly along the intended course. There was an explosion of sound behind her, as at least one barrel of Minty's shotgun discharged into the scalded air, and Lomadia ducked down, aiming a tilted shoulder into the first figure that rose up in front of her. It wasn't a very _good_ tackle, but she had momentum on her side; the pigman squealed as it was hurled forward, bounced off the nearest outcrop, and went down with her full armoured weight across its back. She brought the sword round, quickly picked an angle, and drove the blade through the creature's throat until the squeal stopped.

That got their attention. Empty sockets were swivelled to face her, gaping jaws dropped even further in new howls of rage for their fallen comrade. Lomadia kicked off again, taking a moment of refuge in the air; the ring buzzing like a trapped wasp under her glove, skitting crackles of pain down her hand, but that would have to wait. She dodged a swipe from one gilded blade, kicked another lunging figure in the remains of its face, feeling the _crack_ against her heel as it reeled back, and swung away as half the creature's chest vanished in an explosion of splatter and lead, as Minty caught up.

Disorientated by the gunfire and altitude from the new combatants, the remaining pigmen went down quickly. Facing a few of them – in terms of ratio at least – wasn't much of a problem; if you kept moving, their lurching actions were fairly easy to dodge. Confused between three sources of threat, the last one lunged for her, but crumpled under a blow from behind as an emerald-sheen blade crunched through its half-exposed ribcage, splitting the charred bones like old wood.

Then it was over, and the third armoured figure staggered back, leaning against the rock wall as he pushed his helmet up slightly. A pale stare – wide in the relieved disbelief carved onto his face – met her own, and Lomadia managed a smile.

“Hello, Sjin. Bit of trouble?”

“What, these jokers?” he waved a hand, and Lomadia's smile slipped as she saw the dried-rust smears caked onto his gloves. She caught his wrist and turned it gently, examining his fingers.

“You're hurt?”

“No, it's not...” he stopped again, paling visibly even behind the flush of exertion still on his face, and turned, dashing back into the angled cave mouth behind him. They followed, and Lomadia's breath caught in her throat as Sjin dropped down next to a second familiar form, lain out on the rough netherrack floor.

Minty muttered something expletive and hurried forward, settling down at the other side of Sips and gently pushing Sjin's hands aside, as she tugged off her gauntlets and began to check him over. He was breathing – Lomadia could see the rise and fall of his chest – but shallow, and rapid, and even unconscious as he seemed, his face was twisted in a grimace. She could see why too, as Minty's careful fingers danced around the gory mess at his thigh, and she caught a glimpse of glistening, blackened flesh.

“What did this?” Minty murmured. Sjin had backed up a little, and was gripping his own elbows as he watched.

“Enderman. And then, um... me,” he added, in a tight voice. “It just... pulled it out of him. Like they do, you know, with bricks but... like that. I had to stop the bleeding.”

“You did.” Minty glanced up, pushing her visor back again, and threw a small smile. “He'd be dead by now, otherwise.”

Sjin nodded, miserably, as Minty resumed her examination. Not for the first time, Lomadia furnished the bartender with a more searching glance. There was a small flower embossed onto the corner of her visor, and her slender fingers bore the faint sheen of polish at their tips – those fingers that were rock-steady as she methodically stripped away tattered fabric from around the crater of ruined flesh, angled sword moving with scalpel-precision.

“Got anything fabric, and cleaner than this?”

A sacrificial sleeve was located and folded, and Minty withdrew a flattened, curved metal bottle from her own armour. She unscrewed the cap and nodded to Sjin.

“Hold him still.” She waited until he was repositioned, cradling Sips too-pale head in his lap, then upended the flask over the wound. There was... not so much a _scent_ as an eruption of volatility, a smell something a little like honey, a little like peat, and an awful lot like being punched in the nasal lining by sweetened asphalt. Sips lurched, letting out an initially-wordless yell that quickly focused into one long obscenity as Minty pressed the folded cloth down and bound it swiftly in place. She waited until some of the thrashing stopped, Sjin holding grimly onto his partner's shaking arms, with his own face turned aside, and leaned forward again.

“Sips. Drink this.”

“Oh lord, _seriously?_ ” The syllables escaped before Lomadia could stop them.

“If you've got a better painkiller to hand -?” Minty snapped up, her voice momentarily as sharp as her stare, and Lomadia stood back again, shaking her head. Her hand strayed to the strange depressions on the surface of her own armour, where the half-solid ender fingers had grazed against her back at the island, and she shivered despite the heat. If Nilesy hadn't been talking about creepers so much yesterday, she probably wouldn't even have bothered wearing her suit just for some routine wire-checks.

No one had been expecting any of this. Even – from what she had seen, before they had left on this literally hellish errand – even _Rythian_ and his assorted entourage had seemed wrong-footed by events; and she had certainly heard most of the rumours that flew about the mage. Perhaps there had been nothing to expect. That thought was somehow more uncomfortable than the idea of there being blame to assign. If this nightmare had a cause, then it may well have a solution. If it _didn't_...

She cut the thought. _Not the time_.

Sips sank back again, still grimacing, but at least part of the expression seemed to be distaste now. He inched an eye open and glared at Minty, as she slid the flask back into her chestplate.

“God-d-damn,” he managed, in a voice more croak than full words. “If that's – the best – ” he winced and licked his lips, grimacing again. “You'd make a – fucking terrible poolboy.”

“Good thing we never did that interview.” Minty stood back up, as Sjin muttered something in a voice that trembled slightly with relief, and Sips snorted, wincing. Lomadia lowered her voice as the other woman came past, heading out again.

“How long's that going to last?”

Minty glanced back, and the first flicker of doubt passed behind her eyes.

“Not long, and when it wears off, he'll be worse. We've got to get moving.”

Lomadia swallowed, trying to push away the lump in her throat.

“Think it's... just them, then?” There was little point in trying to keep her voice neutral, and Minty laid a hand on her arm gently, catching her gaze again.

“We have to move,” she repeated, quietly. “I'm sorry, Lom. Best I could do.” She stepped away and vanished around the flanking rocks of the cave, leaving Lomadia staring – unseeing – at the wall.

 _Well... shit_.

“Hey, can I get a hand?” Sjin's voice broke her thought, and she jumped, looking up. He had managed to lever Sips into a standing position, a little awkwardly angled with the shorter man's arm pulled across his shoulders, but he was swaying slightly himself and looked at her imploringly.

“Oh, yes, right, just... spacing out over here. Sure,” she said quickly. They arranged Sips between them, and headed back towards the cave mouth. It was still clear outside, aside from the already-degrading pigman corpses, and Lomadia tried not to let her gaze dwell on the crumpled shapes as they went past. The damn things looked dead already anyway; it was as if decay had just been waiting for its delayed chance at the half-mummified shapes, and now sought to make up for lost time. Even the vibration of their three-way footfalls was enough to cause dried skin to split, falling back into hollowed-out chests, and she resolved to look determinedly in front of them instead.

A figure looming through the constant smoke made them start, but it resolved into Minty quickly enough and she gestured along the valley wall as she slid – another – compass back into her dress.

“This way. We should be able to go round the lava, then we need to get higher. There're pigmen, but they didn't worry about me, so as long as you don't do anything to get them angry again...” she trailed off, looking at Sjin, who bristled a little behind his charred moustache.

“Hey, I didn't - ”

“Such a liar, Sjin,” Sips muttered. He blinked owlishly down at his own feet. “My legs're drunk. Bastards.”

Minty lead the way, occasionally swapping out with one or other of the weight-baring pair, as they pressed on through the molten landscape. At first they managed to talk, before the unforgiving kiln of their surroundings baked away any attempts at speech – Sips occasionally interrupting with a comment, increasingly slurred as the flask's contents worked their way through his perception – and Lomadia listened in stomach-churning horror at Sjin's explanation of how they had ended up at the portal.

 _It really wasn't that bad where we were. Mostly, anyway_ ; she added to herself, remembering the last battle and the display of raw power from the magic set. So _why_...?

“You weren't... up to anything, were you?” she asked carefully, much later as they took a refuge break behind an angled outcrop of rock like a eternally beached boat, smeared with bands of oddly-bright ores. Sjin, fanning himself with his own removed helmet, gave her an affronted look.

“No!” He hesitated under the weight of her stare, then ran a hand through his sodden hair as a grin – which could have been described as 'impish' on someone who did not have access to uranium – tugged at the edges of his lips. “Well, _maybe_. In a general SipsCo kind of way.” His face fell, as his gaze tracked back across to where Sips had been leant against a slope, his head tipped back. “But not this.”

There was another long moment of silence; or at least, as silent as it was possible to get, with the strange acoustics of distant sounds in the burnt-out air.

“We met Rythian.” She wasn't quite sure why she said it, but Sjin just shrugged. “You've still got that...?” she waved a hand, as if a tactful way of putting her next words would somehow condense around the gesture. “...issue, going on?”

“Hey, _I_ don't,” he replied, sharply, and a frown deepened his features. “Big babby Rythian, crying over – over nothing.” The last words were insistently defensive, and Lomadia raised her hands, placatingly.

“I'm just saying. Nilesy likes him,” she added. Sjin snorted, then looked down, turning his helmet round in his hands, his gloves still faintly shaded with dried-out blood. There was a strange expression on his face, and when he spoke his voice was carefully monotone.

“You... ever think you've broken something so badly that... even if you didn't mean to, not really, you can't _not_ make it worse?”

“You never saw me try to master water pumps.” It wasn't exactly an answer, but Sjin's words hung so heavily in the air between them that she felt like an intruder there. For an awkward moment, he didn't reply. Then he laughed, quietly, and the tension at least moved aside, even if it hadn't truly gone.

“Hey, Sips, you remember when - ” He didn't get to finish as – accompanied by a scattered shower of netherrack fragments – Minty appeared again from over the ridge she had gone to scout. She was moving at a run, which was unnerving enough for them both to jump to their feet. She skidded into the half-shelter of the outcrop, breathing hard.

“Right, well, the good news? Is we're not far away, by my reckoning.”

“And the bad news?” Lomadia asked, but her words drowned in a long, drawn-out cry, like something feline in tortuous distress, and Minty jabbed a finger upwards.

“Bad news is – neither is _that_. Come on, we can probably skirt round.”

“Probably?” Lomadia didn't wait for a response, as she joined Sjin in trying to get the prone Sips back onto his feet. He was definitely paler now – an achievement in itself – and a sheen of sweat layered his face. He didn't respond, much, as Sjin cajoled him, and Lomadia felt her stomach twist again.

 _When it wears off, he'll be worse_.

“Come on!” Minty snapped, sounding more urgent than she had so far, and Lomadia shouldered her half of the burden, nudging Sjin's back-cast arm with her own.

“We can move him,” she insisted, to a tight nod of reply, and they hauled the limp form after Minty's waving gestures. The ground sloped here, then sloped again, and again, until 'slope' became 'steep' and the gnarled folds of netherrack plunged down on a knife's edge. Sips hung awkwardly against her as she tried to angle herself to keep footing.

“ _Down!_ ” Minty's yell was punctuated by a dull squawk from somewhere in the smog above them, and Lomadia ducked, dragged to her knees as Sjin went down too and they tried to keep their holds – and something seethed through the air far too close for comfort, bursting against their once-shelter in a storm of fire and breaking fragments. Lomadia staggered back upright, lurching forward again as a horribly-close cracking noise broke the air, and another firing-squawk went off overhead. The fireball missed wider this time, slamming into the creaking outcrop with cannon-force, and she heard the final _crack_ as bracing angles failed.

Sips groaned into her shoulder, slumping against her, and she fought for footing as the ledge lurched violently under them. The loosed, burning outcrop tilted on its axis and _crunched_ down into the angled shelf; Lomadia felt the weight on her shoulders jump as the shaking ground finally took Sjin's balance. He landed hard, scrabbling away as the yawning edge of the cliff, but she barely had time to see the horror on his face as the massive lump of dislodged stone began to roll, and the floor vanished under her feet.

She didn't have enough breath to scream. Her arms jerked in frantic autonomy, pulling Sips closer to her than she had ever envisioned the greyed-out man to be, and her vision vanished in a storm of tumbling shrapnel. The world seemed to be entirely, unavoidably, utterly full of _down_ , pirouetting a nightmare around her as her thoughts unravelled.

There was half a goddamn hillside about to fall after her. The flying ring was unpredictable at best here, and that was on on her own; she was currently clinging to a slowly-exsanguinating dirt company CEO like a bad pool toy; and something from the smog-choked airways of hell itself was hocking fire down at them.

Balls to _this_.

Brilliant pain exploded in her hand as she set the ring and the world lurched nauseatingly, but at least it seemed to have directions again. She swung them forward, wheeling like a drunken firework, and slammed into the cliff face with teeth-jarring force. The rock was shaking; she wedged a leg around Sips' non-ravaged one, trying to use the allowed-angles of her armour to add strength, and dug her fingers into the netherrack. It couldn't have been more than a few moments, stretched to eternity by the twin distortions of terror and sensory overload, as something thundered past behind her like a freight train, tearing slipstream fingers against her skin and peppering her with a maelstrom of shattered stone.

Then it was gone, and she jerked back, gasping at dust-thick air and redoubling her grip on the limp figure, as agony wound up her arm. She felt herself lurch in the air, gravity stretching its hungry maw up towards her failing defiance, and kicked out from the rock like a swimmer, corkscrewing upwards in a set of jerking, erratic loops, each movement bringing her tantalisingly closer to solid ground, each moment as the ring tore into her flesh and she felt her bones scream, _each moment -_

The ring failed, finally, as momentum carried her over the ragged lip of the edge, and brought them both crashing down in an ungainly pile of splayed limbs. Hands grabbed her, pulling her round, and she saw Sjin's face – his mouth moving with words that wouldn't come past the buzzing in her ears – saw Sips pulled from her grasp and frantically checked over – and saw the massive, drowned-white face rising over the cliff-edge before them all, its cavernous mouth drawn open in a shivering cry.

Part of the view vanished in a flutter of flower-print fabric, nearly impossible against the hellfire backdrop, as Minty swung round in front of them, feet planted firmly astride, and the plain-steel blade in her hands. The fireball bloomed, spat down towards the huddled group with point-blank focus – and Minty pivoted in place like a dancer as the coiled-up blast reached her, bringing her sword round with easy grace, and hurled the shot back the way it came.

For the resulting explosion, Lomadia managed just enough presence of remaining mind to shield her eyes, as the shockwave surged over them. Then it was gone, just as suddenly, leaving nothing but a faint scent of burning hair. She lay there, staring up at the smoke-shrouded distant roof, and tried to select an appropriate invective. None seemed entirely right, so she went with traditional.

“Honestly? _Screw_ the Nether,” she growled, and began to try and lever herself back upright. A gauntleted hand appeared in her vision, followed by Minty's face, her eyes glittering dangerously bright in the ambient firelight. Lomadia accepted the proffered help and struggled back onto her unsteady feet, but didn't let go immediately and leaned forward, lowering her remaining voice to a sharp mutter..

“Just – what kind of bartender _are_ you?”

Minty raised one tailored – if slightly charred – eyebrow, and her grip tightened.

“We're going to do this now? _Really?_ ”

Lomadia hesitated, then conceded, and let go.

“No.”

After a bit of slightly shell-shocked adjustment, they moved off again. The distant sounds of ghasts hadn't gone away, but at least they didn't seem to be getting any closer. Lomadia turned her focus firmly onto walking, trying to ignore her own rising thirst, and the increasingly-fraught, half-sensical muttering from one side, as Sjin seemed to be trying to get his friend to respond via the medium of babbling. Sips hung between them, his boots trailing against the floor, and didn't move. He was breathing – short, rapid breaths past cracked lips – but he felt unpleasantly cold even here, as his head lolled back and forth senselessly.

_And if we do get out of here... then what?_

She tried to banish the thought, but it rose again with each one of Sips' gasps breaths, each time she or Sjin stumbled and their whole interlocked edifice wobbled. Who even had the ability – let alone equipment – to deal with something like that? Lalna, maybe; but even if the worryingly-absent scientist _had_ had more luck than the rest of them in this nightmare, they would have to get Sips to him quickly. Her own ring was probably broken now; the hand that supported it currently ached with the kind of pain she was wary of examining; and simply _finding_ the castle would be a feat...

Her morose inner monologue broke as Minty suddenly held up a hand, signalling them to stop. She was peering down at the second compass, which seemed to have several more rapidly-spinning dials than might be expected, and jigged it a bit as she frowned.

“We're here.”

Lomadia looked up, but there was little relief in the sight. A sloping plane stretched out in front of them, its surface scattered with chunks of irregular rock the size of houses, sunken into the cracked-paving surface as if they had been hurled from above. Slicks of darker material wound around the outcrops, shifting slightly under the drifting thermal winds, and Lomadia eyed them suspiciously. Last year, as she had set about mastering the more complicated elements of Owl Island's electronics, she had spent a few weeks under Lalna's proverbial wing getting caught up – and she remembered his then-intense fascination with the various unpleasant native elements of the Nether. That particular ominous substance he had described as 'Non-newtonian and actively malevolent', but the colloquial 'soul sand' had a better ring to it.

_Avoid that, then._

“Not seeing a lot of 'here' to be at, Minty,” Sjin said quietly, as they stared out over the misshapen landscape. Minty pocketed the compass, with an unusually-nervous glance upwards as another distant ghast cry rang out, echoing from rock to rock.

“It's here. From our end.” She shaded her eyes, as much as that was possible, and squinted across the plane. “Shouldn't be long.”

She didn't meet her gaze.


	5. Force of habit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Solving problems with streams, force fields and raw luck.

The endnight was complete. Its liquid grasp curled down over the hidden landscape, cocooning any flicker of firelight into a smothering shell, pressing, tightening, until even those last glimmering gasps would die. Blinded, the living creatures of the once-world huddled together; in caves, under thickly-twisting forest branches, beneath or against anything that might offer some refuge, as the thickened air creaked and swished around them, and unforgiving fingers congealed out of the all-pervasive black.

He hadn't expected this.

A dart of different darkness cut across the hidden sky, faintly outlined to any eye capable of seeing in a tight corona of etherically-inverted light. Faint twists of fading magic spilled into the air, dislodged from the slightly-ragged edge of the slipstream-figure's cloak, or where thin lines of focused power were looped about clenched fingers.

He _should_ have expected this. The thought weighed against him, heavier than the imposed night, as Rythian moved above the obscured landscape, his half-hidden face set in a deep frown. There had been incursions before – his right hand twitched, just a little, at the memories of pain – and he had dealt with them. He had to. And before _that_ , before that particular damoclean burden had settled over him, everything had been... different.

The old memories stirred; restless as ever, shackled like long-chained beasts but no less potent for it. Old ideas, bright and hot in a much younger heart, burning with the gleeful immortality of inexperience – but the possibilities wore a different edge now, a strange echo that filled his thoughts, twining into knots of leaden suspicion . Even the impossible, once done, became easier to repeat.

 _Someone_ should have expected this.

\---

“Just _jump_ , man, for petesake!”

Xephos redoubled his grip on the sword hilt, pinned between heart-skipping terror and abject frustration. How long had they been doing this? Well, not _this_ , exactly, but at least in the overall field – and _every time_ they would end up under-equipped, under attack, and yelling at each other across a chasm.

The jaffa factory was meant to be a break; not exactly a retirement, but something they could do for a while where fleeing for your life from assorted horrible things was a very occasional problem. Sugar, cakes, local beers; all things with a very low intrinsic chance of death-defying shenanigans (with the possible exception of the egg-coaster, but even that was voluntary).

A frustrated wail echoed through the inky darkness, accompanied by splashing.

“I'm a _dwarf_ ;we've only got little legs!”

“And big mouths! You think we haven't got _enough_ things following us?” Xephos spun around at a half-heard sound somewhere on the left-hand bank, but there was nothing visible. The current washed at his shins, rushing past his forever-ruined shoes until it passed out of the little globe of torchlight, and plunged downward somewhere in front him.

“Come on, it's not far.”

“Says the man with - ” Honeydew's retort cut out as there was a _pop_ of shifting air, then a rough-edged, deflating scream, and the dwarf let out a curse, followed by vigorous splashing. Xephos jammed his torch into the river-bank and tensed, in time to dive forwards, grabbing onto the flailing hand as it appeared through the wall of black. Honeydew's fingers closed around his own and he pulled back hard, as the dwarf's golden boots scrabbled at the lip of this side of the sinkhole, dislodging pebbles. They overbalanced, but in the safer way, and went crashing down in a clatter of armour, weapons and cursing, as the icy water washed back over them.

Xephos let out a sodden yelp as Honeydew's scrambling shoved him back down into the streambed, shockingly-cold river water invading any remaining dry bits of his clothes. He jerked back, spluttering, and scrubbed wet hair out of his face.

“Oh, _thanks_.”

“'It's not far', my arse,” Honeydew growled, but thrust out a hand anyway, helping him back up, as Xephos made a few unsuccessful attempts to sweep mud off his jacket. He looked up, in time to see the air behind his friend shiver, a long-angular figure unfolding out nothing – but as its reforming legs sank into the torch-lit river surface, crackles of dark-light spasmed up the limbs and it let out a piercing shriek, and vanished again. Honeydew grinned, stooped down to retrieve his axe, and handed Xephos' sword back up to him.

“I'm a genius. A friggin' genius.” He kicked out, showering more water out into the darkness, as Xephos moved protectively in front of the torch.

“You fell into a pond while attacking an enderman with a piece of fence.”

“Same thing.” The dwarf shrugged, and waved a fist at the wall of night, jeering. “Come'n have a swim, if y'think yer hard enough.”

“...fine,” Xephos sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose. It _had_ been a good idea, that was true, and had given them some much-needed respite in the last few hours.

He had never quite got round to actually sorting all their old adventuring gear out of its crate and into the main factory system – so it had been quick enough to drag the box out from the morass under Honeydew's bed, and grab the basics as the darkness had rolled in like a tide. He only wished he had kept some of their more recent acquirements outside the factory. Sips and Sjin had been heading – airborne – for their own compound the last he had seen of them; flight and lasers would likely make this a lot easier than trekking through streams.

Honeydew stomped wetly back, slinging his axe over one shoulder, and Xephos pulled the torch out of the bank again.

“We going the right way?”

“For the hundredth time, yes.” He scowled as he turned, peering back up the river as far as that was capable, and pressed his hand to the reassuring shape of the compass in his pocket. “I thought dwarves could see in the dark.”

“In the dark, yes,” Honeydew responded as they started off again. “ _This_ is like trying to see with your head in a pig.”

“There's an image I could do without.”

The back-and-forth continued as they moved on, following the river as it wound through forested hillsides; it was partly out of habit, partly of an unspoken agreement to distract one another from the _other_ constant sounds. Too-frequently, gleaming eyes opened in the night around them, and they shied away from snatching hands, retreating into deeper water or hurrying worriedly through shallows. There were other noises too – the scrape and crack of breaking stone, or chilling screams of things not so lucky. Once they had to cross where the river had flowed out over its own banks, leaving a swampy field scattered with tussocks and drier mounds – and the torn-apart corpses of a flock of sheep, their bodies scored open with misshapen gouges like sharpened fingerprints. They hurried on, hearts in their throats until they reached the relative sanctuary of the next stream.

Honeydew saw the light first. He grabbed Xephos' arm, pointing up past the worryingly-low burn of their torch, to where something was visible through the dark shell. At first he thought it was the moon – accompanied by a cruel glimmer of hope that the darkness was thinning – but as he looked, the ragged shape resolved a little better, and he realised they were looking at another rend in the sky; like the one over the factory, only much larger.

“Jesus,” he muttered, pulling out the compass again, with a rising sense of dread. Honeydew shuddered audibly.

“That's where we're going, right?”

Xephos nodded as he pocketed the compass again, his gut twisting. It had seemed a sensible enough option, as chunks of the factory had started to fall behind them. Lalna had forcefields, and every time he had visited the scientist's castle, it seemed he had added something new and often notably-defensive. If anywhere might be safe, that should be it.

“You think he's okay?”

“Yes,” Xephos replied, firmly, as if saying it would convince himself. They stood in silence, staring up into the wounded sky.

“We're running out of river.” Honeydew noted, flatly.

“I know.”

“That torch is pretty low.”

“I know.”

“So, all things considered – we're right in the shit.”

“Uh-huh.”

Something screamed, out in the darkness that seemed to press down either side like a vice, and the rippling-shift sounds of ender-movement slithered through the air. Honeydew glanced up at him, pale behind his sodden beard, and his face broke into a mad grin as he elbowed Xephos in the thigh.

“Let's _do_ this.”

“Oh fucking hell,” he muttered, gripped the sword, and lunged forward as his partner leapt onto the bank, already swinging.

\---

Something was coming. Rythian slowed to a halt, frown deepening as he let his senses roll out – all of them – and his klein star shivered gently against his chest, until even the corrupted world spread out like a map under his feet, sketched out in etharic topography. He was near the castle; the walls of it rose up before him and it _felt_ empty, but it was the emptiness of the blocked, the thaumatological equivalent of a lead-lining.

 _Are you hiding from_ me _, Lalna?_

That wasn't it, though. The feeling dug into his mind, like ragged claw sunk into the back of his skull, and he let out a hiss of pain, trying to filter the sense. There was another point of incursion here and it felt as bad at the others, a great, yawning darkness, held back even now by the opposing pressures of this plane, but that wasn't –

 _You know what this is, Rythian_. _You've felt this before_.

She was coming.

\---

“ _Move_ , friend!”

Xephos' blade cut a sharp arc through the thickened air, slicing its diamond-tip into the dark shoulder as the thing reached out, its fingers skimming narrowly over Honeydew's helmet. Possibly the height difference between targets was confusing them; that one flickered away, and Xephos swivelled round, lining himself up along his partner's back. The torch spat and flickered in his hand, shedding sparks onto his fingers, but he clung on grimly. The idea of being out here in the full dark was far, far too horrible to contemplate.

There ground was sloping under his feet, and he angled the fading light upward, trying to get some idea of where they were. The light flickered against woodwork, a few sharp right-angles of carefully-aligned planks, and he scrabbled for memories, trying to bring up any idea of where they were. The... station? It wasn't as if there was much else in the way of options, as his heart beat a frantic rhythm and he jammed an elbow into Honeydew's shoulder.

“Up there! Move!” his voice cracked a little, as more glittering eyes swivelled towards them, more howls cut the air.

“Calm the _fuck_ down!” Honeydew hollered back, sounding anything but calm, and they broke into a sprint. Another angular shape unfolded in their path, Xephos cut up sharply but the blade came short, as the creature flickered aside, faster than the last, and slung its half-formed hand around Honeydew's up-tilted throat.

The dwarf yelped – Xephos' breath caught in his chest, a scream latching against his ribs – and then the enderman jerked back, howling as trails of dissolving black hissed up from its ruined fingers, and snapped away. Xephos caught his friend's arm; the dwarf was coughing violently, but he lurched back onto his feet and they scrambled up the slope. The wooden steps up to the little building had been half torn away and the rest wobbled wildly under them, but held enough. Both men hit the raised floor awkwardly, rolling further under the low roof as the torch skittered away, wedging against a wall. Xephos swallowed a cry of his own as something traced across his lower back with a bizarre sensation that felt like tearing fabric, only shot through with ragged pain, but it didn't catch as he rolled further inside.

“Honeyd - ” he started, scrambling round, but the dwarf was already half-up against one of the track terminals, hunched over and breathing roughly. Xephos dragged himself over and caught onto his friend's shoulder, tilting him back, dreading the sight – but while the skin was an angry red, speckled through with purple like it had been twisted against itself, it was whole. Relief hit like a hammer-blow, and he sat back, panting.

“You – how?”

“Heh,” Honeydew managed a short laugh, past another cough, and batted the thick braids at his chin, sending a few droplets of relocated river peppering Xephos' face. “Soggy – soggy dwarf - ”

Xephos snorted, a half-laugh breaking out as he leaned his head back and stared up at the roof.

“We are so bad at this,” he muttered. Honeydew nodded and craned round, peering out of the open station from. From below them came the first sounds of tearing woodwork.

“Forcefield's up.”

Xephos followed his gaze, and there was indeed a faint greenish sheen to the darkness out there.

“Think he knows we're here?”

“No idea.” Honeydew pulled himself up and kicked at one of the metal carts. “Think these work?”

“No idea.”

Xephos stood up, a little shakily, and slung his sword across his back as he climbed into one of the carts. He felt weirdly calm, quite possibly because all the fear had taken the brief respite as chance to recharge and regroup. If the carts _didn't_ work...

That particular concern vanished as Honeydew pulled a lever, and was replaced by entirely new ones as acceleration took undue interest in him. Xephos grabbed on to the steel sides; his cart shot forward and launched violently up into the blacked-out air, marrying vertigo and claustrophobia into several long, horrible seconds. At first it seemed as if it would keep rising, right over the hidden castle and into the torn void in the sky – then his stomach lurched up into his throat as the arc moved into a descent. The greenish force-field sheen finally gave some direction to the drop, rising up in front as the cart plunged, and he saw the swarming figures around the base, visible by the faint light and their own angled shadows.

_How in the blazes were there so many?_

“Oh _fuck_ \- ” he nearly swallowed his tongue as the cart hit something – hopefully intentional – hidden beneath and veered abruptly sideways; he tightened his already-white knuckles against the metal until his skin screamed; the ride swerved, bounced, swerved again and rose vertically up a cliff – and stopped with a spine-wrenching jolt. He just about had presence of mind left to throw himself sideways, toppling out of his cart onto the green-lit ground below, as a second delivery of yelling dwarf missed him by inches. Xephos rolled over, his fingertips scraping at the edge of the narrow cliff; his boots impacted on the frictionless solidity of the field behind them and Honeydew began to throw up nosily.

They had come to a stop on a strip of barely-vegetated rock, partway up the restructured hillside that Lalna's castle crouched atop. The rest of the cart track continued inside the field, just visible against the torch-lit castle walls within, but their ledge barely extended a few metres before falling away either side, into -

Xephos scuttled back from the edge as his brain finally accepted details of the too-close view. For as far as the field's dull illumination could reach, the hillside was so thick with endermen than the ground could have been replaced with the seething black tide. Dozens – hundreds – _oh christ, maybe thousands_ – of unblinking eyes glittered in the congealed darkness, and a knotted web of shifting fingers pressed ineffectually up against the shimmering forcefield.

They were everywhere. Xephos eased back, groping for his partner. His neck muscles didn't seem to want to work, so he leaned down awkwardly, trying to coax more than a horrified squeak out of his throat.

“We- we're _screwed_ ,” he muttered, and Honeydew looked up sharply, scrubbing at his mouth.

“Huh?”

Crouched low, Xephos steered the dwarf over to the edge of their unexpected aerie, and watched any remaining colour drain from his face.

“...well...bugger me sideways...”

They both flatted themselves back against the forcefield, neither one trying to _breathe_ loudly.

“What d'we do _now?_ ” Honeydew whispered out of the corner of his mouth, and Xephos clenched his fists, jigging silently against the frictionless surface.

“He has to know we're here. He'll have... science things, that tell him.”

“Science. Things.”

“I'm _thinking!_ ” he hissed, and froze as there was a ripple of ender-sound below them. When death did not immediately arrive, he managed to unlatch his jaw. Right. They had to get Lalna's attention. If the field was up, he was alive – that was good. That was something to focus on.

“At least they're not looking for us - ” he started but cut off as Honeydew let out a loud groan, and he tried ineffectually to slap a hand over the dwarf's mouth.

“Why would you say that? Our luck does _not_ need you saying shit like that!”

They felt the roar before they heard it. The noise seemed to come from everywhere at once, a terminal, penetrating vibration that caught around every nerve and lit them up with a particularly-primal variety of fear. Xephos' face set itself into a rictus of horror as the thickened air froze in his lungs, against his skin, suffused with that sound until even breathing was like sucking back a scream.

“ _Lalna!_ ” Honeydew swivelled round and hammered against the field, all pretence of subtlety gone as the roar came again, rolling down across the landscape in sonically-incarnate terror. _“For fuck's sake! Let us in, you crazy bastard!_ ”

Xephos couldn't even move. Every muscle seemed to have locked, choking him from the inside, as he heard the tiny-horror sounds of ender-interest, saw the flickering shapes start to grasp at the edges of their cliff, begin to drag away clumps of soil and stone – so close, so close now to the tips of his shoes, and he saw the eyes gleaming as they found them – reaching out, and he couldn't _move_.

_Lalna – please – friend – you have to -_

\---

It was always forcefields. Rythian hung in the air and glared accusingly at the shimmering surface. This one was only a single layer thick, but it curved away far into the dark either side, a huge gleaming dome larger than the last time he had seen any of Lalna's impressively-paranoid defences in action. They seemed prudent enough now, with endermen swarming like insects around the base, but that still didn't help him much. This one couldn't be overcome with piling dirt.

He rose a little higher, until the remnants of the cannon was visible, torn down flush against the field-edge by grasping hands. Not even the endermen seemed able to get through; no surprise, really, given how little help his void ring had been under Blackrock. The fields... interfered somehow, twisted up across the interface between magic and science – the one that grated so roughly against all his own sensibilities, and yet the one Zoey walked so well.

_How would you do this?_

Floating a little closer, he carefully pushed his hand against the frictionless surface; it was all pressure, but no tactile sensation, and he felt the new skin on his fingers stretch as they slid aside. There had to be some way in.

He felt the roar before he heard it. That sound – _her_ sound – that blood-deep, bone-wrenching cry of pure rage that jarred his heart. His hand snapped down to his hip, pressing against the hilt of enderbane until glints of pain lit the skin, and he let out a long, careful breath, peering up into the torn sky. The edges of the slash were as ragged as ever, but now something moved behind them, pushing against the shifting interface of worlds, all sharpness and half-formed angles.

It wouldn't be long. A thin sound of frustration escaped his lips. There had to be a way inside; whatever it was – _whatever else_ – that drew them here, it had to be in the castle. And he had no idea how to -

The field flickered, and by instinct so did he. The world snapped shut and back again in the full-body blink of the ring, and he came up short against the nearest tower wall, nearly breathing brick. He dropped down a few metres, peered into the torchlight below, and froze as the shimmering green snapped back into place behind him. Memory tripped – that too-recent, stomach-churning moment of sudden impotence, all his so-carefully honed power rendered quite useless in a thin flicker of red-green light – but he shook it away. Lalna wasn't waiting for _him_ this time.

Hopefully.

Enderbane slid back into his still-healing grip, and Rythian felt the half-real presence of its price tighten back along his arm like a hundred tiny, impatient teeth. The field had only been down for a few seconds – for whatever reason, he couldn't worry much about _that_ now – but it had been long enough for him, and he didn't fancy being surprised.

He landed on the nearest battlement and slid along the crenellated pathway, a moving shadow with nerves that twanged like an anxious harp. There were voices below him, and he set his jaw as he crept forward to peer over into the main courtyard.

\---

The pressure on his shoulderblades cut out and Xephos half-toppled backwards, his limbs contriving to go limp with relief and spasmodic in the sudden, desperate need to _run_ at the same time; leaving him scrambling frantically upright while his panic-frazzled mind tried to remember how many legs he had. Honeydew caught his elbow and yanked him more effectively forward, accompanied by a rib-level, half-deafening shout.

“ _Run_ , you bloody great useless!”

The crack-swish of displacing air went off behind them as they sprinted towards the torchlit castle walls, and Xephos only just had time to start wondering how they were going to get _in_ before death could catch them up – when a blessedly-familiar voice yelled:

“ _Down!_ ”

\- and he went down like snapped elastic as Honeydew kicked his legs out and hit the ground next to him in a crash of battered armour. The air ignited above them, suddenly full of swarming, vicious bursts of scarlet and wrong-noted screams. Xephos clung to the floor, trying to push away the horrible dizzy sensation that if he let go he would fly straight up into the deadly chaos above – until he realised that the sounds had stopped, replaced with just the now-usual background horribleness, and a dull thud of footfalls. He rolled over, and looked up as a pale, upside-down face swung into view.

Lalna looked exhausted. His face had a faintly grey hue, his hair was messy even outside usual standards, and a few patches of his labcoat were faintly charred. He pushed his goggles back up onto his forehead, and the eyes that looked back were visibly bloodshot, rimmed with circles so dark they were almost a bruise.

“Hell's bells.” Honeydew levered himself upright. “What was _that?_ ”

Xephos followed his gaze. The weapon in Lalna's gloved hands looked like the unholy offspring of several drainpipes and a flamethrower. The ends of the dozen or so tubes that made up the long barrel glowed with heat, and there were little red lights flickering ominously across along the grip. Lalna glanced down, blinking.

“It needed more lasers,” he said, distantly, then shook himself and a little more focus condensed into his eyes. “I'm – you're okay?”

“Mostly.” Xephos looked hard at the scientist, new worry curling up around his thoughts. He looked bad, even for current expectations. “Good to see you, friend.”

“You too.” Lalna glanced behind them, out at the grasping darkness behind the field, and shook his head. “Come on, we'd better go in. And watch out, I'm not sure how many will have got in at the sides. Should've put a tunnel in, really.”

They followed him along the castle walls and in through the huge, steel-ribbed doors that slammed shut behind them with metallic finality. Lalna moved like a man precariously on edge – which was understandable enough – glancing erratically from side to side, but he seemed to relax a little as the doors closed, and looked back at them.

“You came from the factory?” He glanced up, to where the edge of the sky-rip was just visible over the dome of his reactor tower. It was a lot better lit in here, Xephos realised; the shadows were thicker than they should be, but the tarry smothering of outside didn't look like it came past the forcefield either. Somehow, the realisation wasn't as reassuring as it should be.

“Yup,” Honeydew replied and jabbed a thick finger skyward. “We got one of them buggers too, thought you'd be doing a bit better.”

“Yes, well - ”

“Lost Sips and Sjin though,” the dwarf continued, conversationally, and Lalna stiffened, his reddened eyes widening.

“Lost _track of_ ,” Xephos corrected quickly. “They flew off. We, er, waded.”

Lalna slumped back against the courtyard wall, dropping the gun with a carelessness that probably shouldn't be applied to something still hot enough at one end to singe the grass, and tilted his head back against the stone. His face twitched, a variety of expressions passing too quickly across his greyed features to really hold, and he let out a long breath.

“Look,” he said, carefully. “I'm... working on something. For all this. I – I think I can _fix_ it, but... ” he hesitated and ran a hand through his hair, pushing it into new disarray. “I didn't expect - ”

One moment, he was standing, the next there was a sudden _swish_ of displaced air, and the scientist was slammed face-first into the bricks, one arm wrenched so far up his back that he yelled out. Then he was slung round, tilted against the dark shape behind him as a cold-bright blade pressed against his throat.

“ _What_ , Lalna?” The voice was somehow _shockingly_ familiar – known well enough, but so against every expectation there had been for that moment, that the presence seemed unbearably alien. Rythian's gloved fingers tightened in Lalna's hair, dragging his head further back, and his own gaze burned in the reflected light. “What didn't you expect? That anyone would _know?_ ”

“Rythi-an,” Lalna choked, straining away from the vicious edge. “I didn't – I swear – _you_ have to -”

“I _have to?_ ” the mage's voice was guttural with fury, his gleaming eyes wide; Xephos scrambled for his own sword, and Honeydew started up on obscenities. “My blade at your damned throat, and you still think you can - ?”

“Oh, _your_ blade? Really?” Lalna managed, past the restraint, and Rythian went very still. He made a strange noise, some half bitten-back snarl of strangled anger, and Xephos tensed himself to lunge.

There was – in the utter entirety of past, future or a compound-multiverse of present moments – _no other_ conceivable time that a hell-born roar from an eviscerated sky could be considered to improve a situation. Or if there was, Xephos never, ever wanted to consider why _else_ that would be. The sound slammed down like an impact, jolting its heartbeat of paralysis through each one of them; but – with his nerves already apparently stretched to bow-string tension – Lalna reacted first. Before Rythian could recover his furious composure, the scientist jerked his head back hard, slamming into his sudden-captor's face with a _crack_ that echoed around the walls. Rythian yelped, clutching at his jaw, and Lalna dropped like a stone, ducking out of the surprise-weakened restraint and lunged for his laser. Rythian recovered fast, but Lalna had the edge of surprise, rolled, and brought the weapon up as the mage rounded on him again. Silence pressed back down, broken only by breathing and a rising-pitched electronic whine.

No one moved.

“Think you're faster than light, magic-boy?” Lalna muttered, blinking sweat out of his eyes. Rythian's mask twitched as his hidden lips twisted in a sneer.

“Oh, I doubt that – but all I _have_ to be is faster than you.”

“ _For gods' sake!_ ” Some of the tension broke under Honeydew's thundering yell. The dwarf stomped forward, waving a hand expansively between the two locked gazes. “Alright! You've both got truly titanic sciencey-magic balls – can you fucking knock it off already? Bigger problems!”

“Come on,” Xephos added, as he carefully edged forward and – nerves fluttering in his stomach – slid between the two glowering opponents. It was remarkably easy to do, considering the antagonism had seemed to have become a physical pressure in its own right, and he slowly moved his fingers away from his own weapon, spreading his hands placatingly and trying not to think of crossfire.

“Please? Lalna?” he sought out his friend's gaze, and searched for a connection in the wide, wild stare. The scientist shrugged, his gun shaking slightly, and glared over Xephos' shoulder.

“If he'd be more likely to _help_ than skewer me - ”

“I am not a madman,” Rythian snapped, and Xephos blinked. This close, with the mage almost breathing down his neck, there was something else in his voice; a faint, halting edge, almost muffled entirely behind the mask and the anger. He... was afraid? The idea was so ludicrous that he couldn't hold back a faint snort of disbelief, and Rythian bristled.

“I want to know what you've _done_ ,” he snarled. Xephos looked down again as Lalna's lips pressed together, an odd expression washing down his face; and he saw the tension in the man again, the strung-out correcting focus that he _knew_ , that he had seen before, if not on this scale, and his earlier words echoed again. ' _I think I can fix it'_.

“What's he mean, friend?” he asked cautiously, and Lalna winced a little under his gaze. The moment stretched out, fragmented futures threaded through the air like sharpened wire – then the scientist's thumb moved, and the rising laser-whine cut out as he let the weapon tilt back down.

“I'll show you.”


	6. Stone cold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loose ends and wanderers, and the defensibility of volcanoes.

The landscape had become increasingly, obviously volcanic as the mismatched group of refugees made their blinded way south, following the advice of compass and guesswork as much as actual cartography. Jagged outcrops of raw basalt jutted out of the more smoothed-over surfaces, sometimes shed entirely clear of the thin coat of soil and determined vegetation, and once or twice they had to take a detour around an unexpected, yawning crack in the earth, the distant gleam of lava deep below spilling sulphurous thermals up into the clotted air.

Babyjim had had some _big_ relatives, once.

They saw few endermen, as they wound their way further and further into the maze of dark rocks and stubborn trees. A few times, one or two elongate shapes would unfold beside the path, but the strung-out reactions of eight people, two wolves and a bereaved golem took care of that quickly enough.

Ravs led the way, torch in one hand and Minty's suspiciously-detailed map in the other, flanked by the demi-identical pair in overalls. They seemed to have worked out a fairly good strategy for handling individual ender-opponents, as impaling one through the jaw with an upthrust railroad spike seemed to distract it long enough for everyone else to pile in. It probably didn't count as a _specific_ weakness though, as Zoey was pressed to think of anything that would be on top-form after taking four foot of sharpened steel to the chin.

Even those occasional attacks seemed to be becoming less frequent. By the time Ravs called a halt at the base of a hulking cliff, scattered with caves that were dark even in their hemisphere of torchlight, it had been some time since they had even _heard_ one. That should have been reassuring, but she remembered clearly how many of the wrong-angled figures had poured down out of the sky. If they weren't here; they were somewhere else. And so was he.

There was some rapid discussion at the fore of the party, then Ravs and the big man – Strapping, or something similarly-appropriate – vanished into the cave, making 'wait here' gestures. The rest of the group drew together around the entrance, any existing lines of politics thoroughly discarded now as they tried to cover all available directions at once. Tee clawed his way up one of the small outcrops of rock to the caveside, hunkering down at the top with his tail braced against the cliff, and notched a wary arrow.

“D'you think he can see through this?” Nilesy had taken over mooshroom-wrangling duties, after a firm declaration of 'a poolman looks after his weird fungus cow namesakes; basic rule, sort of', and he peered at Zoey over the fuzzy head of said creature, which was making an idle attempt to eat his tie. She shrugged.

“Maybe? Wouldn't be surprised if he'd got like, super-dinovision.”

“I hope so; I really do. Ach, ye bam, get _off_.” He ducked under the grazing attention, trying to brush hyphal spit off chewed fabric, and Zoey grinned.

“They like you.”

“They think I'm edible,” Nilesy grumbled, as another red-daubed head butted him gently in the back. “C'mon buddy, leave it out.” He dodged away again, and nearly fell over a wolf, which looked up at him reproachfully as he flailed. Zoey giggled, and she heard a couple of amused sounds from some of the less-familiar huddle-ees.

“Hold still, I'll - ” she leaned over, reaching for the tangled-up lead, but her fingertips froze in their path as the new sound hit, rolling out of the darkness in a physical wave of noise that iced the breath in her chest and coiled spirals of horror down her spine. It was something like a roar, but the word didn't seem _enough;_ she felt her own less-conventional senses jolt against the sound and she swung round, searching for the source and dreading what she might see. Then it had passed – and noise shouldn't behave like that, not like a wave of liquid fury across the hidden landscape – but it brought new sounds in its wake: the suddenly-close ripples of ender movements behind the torchlight wall.

“They're back!” the blond youth yelled, raising his emerald-blade, as the howling started up around them. Something in the combination – the dreadful roar, or the wrong-angled shriek of ender voices so close and so hidden – was finally too much for even the mooshrooms' placid natures, and Zoey was knocked aside as the trio of speckled creatures lumbered forward suddenly, rumbling in distress.

“No, don't - !” she caught herself against the cliff, as Nilesy lurched after the panicking shapes, dragged forward by the lead still wrapped around his wrist. He stumbled, losing footing, and fell into an awkward crouch, trying to pull back as the first mooshroom reached the edge of the thickened darkness – and something reached out to meet his dragged-out grasp.

Zoey couldn't be sure if fireball or arrow landed first, but both came a fraction too late, as slick-dark fingers closed around his arm and the _crack_ seemed to echo like a gunshot. He gave a strangled yelp, then the reaction-projectiles hit home and the enderman was tossed backward in a blur of breaking motes. Zoey leapt forward, heart in her mouth, and caught one arm around Nilesy's shoulder, the other held out in a ball of readied fire as she swung from side to side, trying to see anything past the inky black.

“Go after them!” she shouted, desperately, and two streaks of furry speed shot after the vanishing mooshrooms, both wolves slipping through the half-solid wall in a flick of swashing tail – and then they were gone too, and Zoey dragged her wounded friend back towards the cave mouth. He was very pale, even in the torchlight, and was cradling his left arm against his chest.

_I said I'd look after them. I promised I would. I promised._

“They'll be fine. You'll be fine. No problem,” she muttered, barely paying attention to her own words as she tried to get a look at the damage, half not wanting to see at all. “Let's just – let's have a - ” she trailed off. The skin under his tattered sleeve was livid with fresh bruising, blistering visibly along the edge of the swelling flesh.

“S-sorry,” he managed, through teeth gritted so hard she could hear them grinding. “I shouldn't have – oh my _god_ this hurts –”

Another arrow whistled overhead and vanished into the darkness. Zoey undid her cloak clasp and slung the material over Nilesy's tensed shoulders, trying to get a good angle to bear weight.

“Don't worry, okay? Willow and Ghost Junior, they know what's up, they'll be cool. It's fine.” She wrapped the fabric under his cradled arm, wincing as he bit down on another yelp. “Right, right, if I can just... Oh gosh, I haven't made a sling before, but better than not?”

The smaller of the possibly-twins was shouting down into the cave behind them, as the outside group ducked nervously in. It was a tight squeeze, but no one could ignore the glimmer of eyes just outside their little universe of light – and the presence of rocky walls rather than arbitrary torchlight ones was a little more reassuring.

The heavy night closed down after them as they backed inside, until the flickering light barely crept out of the cave-mouth and tangled darkness hung like a curtain across the opening, rippling strangely with hidden movements. Tee shuffled in last, his slit-nostrils flaring as he growled softly, and swung his adapted bow from side to side across the featureless black.

“Stripp! We got issues, dude, you still back there?” the other twin yelled again, and this time there was an answer – indistinct, in the bouncing echoes of the narrow space, but sounding more irritated than menaced, and they kept moving. The passageway got narrower and narrower, twisting at awkward angles until Tee and the remaining golem were starting to have some difficulty manoeuvring; then it opened out rather abruptly into a much larger cavern. Torchlight spilled out into the underground gloom, but at least it felt more like normal darkness in there, and Zoey raised her hand higher as she stepped out into the open space, pouring a little more fire around her fingers.

It was a _large_ cave. Smoothed-out channels ran along the walls, layered over one another in the fossil ghosts of molten stone, and more tunnel mouths yawned open at each end like some huge subterranean hive. The various firelights met with the glow from Rav's own torch, wedged into a crack in the rock; Ravs himself was wobbling slightly a good way up the wall, his boots planted on Strippin's shoulders, and was stretching a length of string across one of the raised tunnels.

“Sorry,” he twisted as he spoke, prompting a grunt from below. “Having a bit of trou – ble!” he cut off, grabbing hold of the lip of the opening and glared down. “Watch it; can't yeh just _lift?_ ”

There was a faint growl of answering annoyance from between his ankles.

“We're not starting that again. And you're in a kilt – so I'm working in adverse conditions.” The big man hefted the balancing Scot a little higher, face turned firmly towards the floor.

“Spot of impromptu caving there, lads?” Nilesy slumped his uninjured side against the wall, grimacing.

“Ender-guys are back,” Zoey said, peering up. “What're you doing?”

“Looking for the right size. Nah, not this one either.” Ravs gave a low hiss of frustration, as he was lowered back down. “Hoping one'd be quick to find.” He ran a hand through his hair, frowning. “I thought... damn, I thought it'd be easier than this.”

“ _What_ are we looking for?” Nilesy cut in, his voice sharpened by strain, and Ravs blinked as he noticed the makeshift sling.

“Something for a portal frame. She thought we could set up another one here, if we can find a good gap.”

“They're in the _Nether?_ ” Nilesy leaned his head back against the rock wall. “Well, that's just bloody fantastic, isn't it?” He half-slid, half-sat down, and the darker-haired youth dropped down next to him, muttering. Ravs peered up at the uneven cave surface, worry etched on his features, and Zoey looked around, turning her own light around the walls as she tried to envision a portal frame. How specific did it need to be? All the ones she had seen before were built things, measured and carved deliberately for the purpose. There were a lot of alcoves here, but she was very aware of the pressure baring down on them, and of the faint ender-sounds drifting down the blacked-out tunnel. Did they even have time to scan through all of the -?

 _Scan?_ Zoey blinked, then darted forward and grabbed Ravs' arm.

“ _What_ are we after? Like, exactly?”

Ravs' frown deepened, but he pulled out the map again and flipped it over, to where a rough schematic sketch of a rectangular frame had been scrawled on the back. Thin arrows were drawn through clusters of numbers, one circled in each direction, and Zoey took a careful breath.

“Right. Good. Goo-d. Got an idea.” She took the paper from his unresisting fingers and hurried over to where the remaining golem had taken up a position in front of the entrance tunnel, his huge metal fists swinging agitatedly as a red glow trailed up and down his limbs. She held out the paper.

“Can you scan for this? In here?”

The golem turned his flat face towards the paper, then to her, then back to the tunnel as another distant ripple of noise filtered strangely towards them. His eyes gleamed again, angry in the gloom, and Zoey laid a hand against the big metal arm.

“I'll get him rebuilt. Promise? Had a lot of... Gilbert-y practise,” she said, quietly. For a moment, he didn't move, then there was a flicker within the tracing bright lines and the light changed abruptly to a bright turquoise. The golem looked down, then swivelled and lumbered out into the middle of the cave, eyes glowing. A thin line of white-bright appeared on the opposite wall and began to move along as he rotated, patterns flashing along the angular surface of his head.

“What the -?”

“This will totally work. Ssh.” Zoey followed the scanning light, biting her lip. This would _totally_ work. Of course a golem – mostly made of magic and iron and appropriated squash – would be able to do spatial calculation in the middle of a lavacave. Why not? He'd found her in the mushroom volcano prison, and navigating was practically identical, with all the distances and angles and -

“OBJECTIVE LOCATED.”

She could have punched the air. _Awesome_. The golem's head tilted back, and a rectangular wireframe flicked over a space a few feet off the ground on one far wall. It looked about right, although -

“Wrong way up,” Ravs muttered, his shoulders slumping, and Zoey glared at him.

“Not even going to try it?” She stepped into the air and swung over, until her own shadow fell across the projected shape.

_If this doesn't work..._

She wiggled her hand inside the centre of the space, letting a little bit of fire rise out around her fingers, but nothing happened. Frowning, she cocked her head to one side and stared hard at the smoothed-out dark stone. How did you start a portal up, anyway? The normal ones just needed a spark; she remembered Rythian talking about it – in that half-focused way he had when he was working, idly describing or playing out ideas. You needed enough from this side to make the connection – the frame, the shape of the door being one thing, and the key-spark another. She leaned forward and traced her fingertips down the old black stone, imagining the long-vanished heat of their once-movement; like the potential roasting her ring diverted when she played with babyJim, the cloying-thick feel of molten stone and flow currents in the brilliance.

There had been fire here once. She kicked back, getting herself a good couple of metres distance from the slanted dent in the rock. There could be again – but a _spark_ wasn't enough.

 _Never tell me you can't do magic_.

The fireball hit hard enough to splash, spilling burning embers down across the floor of the cave, and for a hesitant heartbeat, nothing happened – and then the portal caught, a sudden gossamer-sheet of dark violet that flicked into existence as if it had always been there, and the dull static-hiss of it crept outwards, raising goosebumps.

“Nice!” This time she _did_ punch the air, and swivelled round to grin back at the figures now hurrying over to her, a strangely-similar set of surprised expressions spread across very different faces. “I'm amazing. You can say it; it's fine.”

“Let's just hope we got the right place.” Ravs reached the raised lip of the new doorway first, peering into the portal as it cast strange shadows over his features. “I dunno if - ” he stopped as there was a change in the shifting surface, like a distant reflection in fogged glass. It was impossibly far away inside the depthless layer, but the lines of it became more distinct even as they shimmered and writhed under the kaleidoscopic patterns that danced across the surface.

“Make some space.” Ravs took a step back, waving a hand, and the portal surface bulged forward and stayed flat all at once; an impossibly _active_ lack of movement that hurt the eyes to try and resolve. Then some resistance gave out, and he was suddenly borne to the cave floor by the force of impact, as a slightly-smoking figure broke from of the shifting surface, moving at speed, and hit him full in the chest.

Minty – her previous visor missing, her grim expression smeared and smudged with soot and red-hued dirt – was suddenly crouched over the fallen man, the barrel of her shotgun pressed to his throat. There was another one of those very _busy_ moments, and then some abrupt tension broke away and she leapt to her feet, glancing around, whip-crack fast, and slung the gun back across her shoulders with a small sigh.

“Oh, thank god...” She swung a hand down and grasped Ravs' arm, helping him back up as he rubbed at his neck, looking affronted.

“Ye didn't have to - ”

“ _Sideways?_ ” She turned back towards the portal and shook her head, swinging slightly-charred hair around her face. “Even I didn't know you could do that. Get ready to catch.”

Something else was coming, as the surface distorted under itself again, shivered, and a entwined chimera of forms toppled out. The first armour-clad figure stumbled as she resolved, awkwardly righting against the slanted entry; the other upright shape managed to catch himself against the edge of the repurposed frame, and the third figure fell forward, limp in Minty's arms as she dashed forward to take his weight.

“Bloody hell.” The armoured woman – Lomadia, Nilesy's friend, looking a lot more battered than the last time Zoey had seen her – slumped, grabbing onto her own knees as she hunched over and visibly swallowed heaves. “What in the blazes - ?”

“Sideways,” Minty repeated as she carefully lowered her burden to the floor. “Sjin? Make some noise, please.”

“I'm – I'm okay.” _That_ voice was like a bolt of ice to her gut, and Zoey shot back a few feet instinctively as she stared at the other upright figure, leaning heavily against the dark rock. The last time she'd heard that voice...

Minty swore, very suddenly, and began fiddling rapidly with the hidden clasps on the fallen man's armour. She shifted position, and it was only then that Zoey saw the missing leg plates, the makeshift bandage, and the sheer extent of dark staining down his thigh.

_Oh my gosh..._

Sjin dropped down beside Minty, and grabbed for her arm.

“Min - ”

“Get the armour off,” she snapped, her voice suddenly tight. Sjin froze.

“Wh...?”

“He's not _breathing!_ ” Minty grunted as she tugged back hard, dislodging the outer layer of green-black plating, and Sjin made a small, desperate noise and snatched at the other clasps. The rest of the armour fell away and Minty pressed her fingers to Sips' throat – it clearly _was_ Sips, pale even by his standards and bloody by anyone's – with worry twisting her own features.

“Come on, Sips,” she muttered, as she pinched his nose, leaning down to add her own breath to the stilled chest. “Don't do this now.”

“Got eyes back here!” The warning shout was punctuated by Tee's growl, as another ripple of ender-sound bounced down the blacked-out tunnel. Lomadia lurched upright and headed for the tightening knot of defenders, drawing her now very-notched sword, but the others didn't move. Minty worked with precise – if slightly frantic – speed, bringing her stacked palms down firmly on Sips' sternum, breathing for him every cycle of pressures, but there was already sweat running down her face and a tired shake to her arms hands, and no response.

Sjin had grasped one of his friend's hands, winding his own fingers around the motionless glove. He was muttering – cajoling, berating – and the words were getting louder with each of Minty's abrupt ministrations.

“...on't fucking be _dead_ , you absolute, utter bastard – you aren't _allowed_ to be...”

There was a faint creak of displacing air somewhere behind them, and a short cry of alarm, and another teleport sound.

“It'll be back, we need to move - ”

“Come _on_ ,” Minty gasped, shovelling damp hair out of her face. Sjin was shouting now, angry, desperate nonsense that seemed to fill the darkening cave with hollowed-out horror, and his eyes gleamed damply in the portal light.

Where was the arrogance? Where were the grinning, half-veiled threats; the weirdly-playful gloating that had last suffused that voice?

_I guess the mushnet assessment was right._

Zoey's gaze tracked back to Sips' dreadfully pale face, then her feet hit the ground again and she dropped down next to him. Sjin swung round, his free hand jerking towards his sword as he focused on her, but Zoey caught his gaze and he hesitated.

“Tee's got the call on forgiving for cages, alright?” She fished around in her shirt until she found the fine chains at her neck, and tugged them free, feeling the rings go dormant against her fingers as the klein star pulled away. Minty moved aside, and she looped the chains over Sips' head, tucking first the star, then the little rune-scattered rectangle that sat beside it, into his shirt. She felt the hum of rising power under her fingertips as the stone met flesh, a little hesitant at first, with the sudden change in body, but she knew personally-well that lifestones could be swapped around.

“What's that?” Minty asked, quietly, suspicion curling her neat brows as she looked down at the fabric-shrouded shapes. It wasn't – admittedly – the most obviously dramatic form of magic, and the blonde woman's fingers went back to Sips' throat, pressing experimentally into the curve of his neck. She blinked.

“That's... a bit better.” She looked down and suddenly drew her sword, holding the flat of the blade up to his lips. He was still grey – how did you determine cyanosis in someone with the natural complexion of newsprint, anyway? – but the faintest of fog now crept across the steel's surface, and Minty sat back with a short laugh of relief.

Zoey let out her own held breath. She hadn't been sure – not totally sure – that the stone would work. How long it would take to heal whatever the hell had happened to his leg – or if it even could – was a different question, of course, but it was a start. Or not an end, at least. Either way, not bad.

“Don't take it off,” she said, carefully. “It... sort of takes over for bits that aren't working so well, I guess. Actually healing's a bit slower.”

Minty nodded. She reached back and twisted more of her disarrayed blonde locks behind her, then stood up and turned her attention towards the rising commotion near the entrance tunnel. One hand dropped onto Sjin's shoulder as she passed, tightening against the scuffed armour for a moment, then she was gone in a swirl of skirt and a faint scent of charred cotton.

Sjin himself had gone very quiet. His gaze was fixed on Sips' face, his expression caught somewhere between dazed and disbelief, but as Zoey went to stand up, his free hand darted towards her – stopped – and his fingers twitched in the air, part wave, part grasp, and he hesitated again.

“After...after every... I don't...” he trailed off and wiped his free hand down his face, smudging more nether-dust patterns onto the damp skin, as he took a shaky breath. “Thank you.”

“Don't get me wrong,” Zoey said quickly, as if explaining would dispel the rising storm of unsaid complications. “We've got a lot of stuff to sort out. And Tee'll probably bite you if you get near him. But I'm not so much with the... dying, thing, on the whole, so that's cool.”

There wasn't time for the moment to weigh down on itself any further, as a blast like a localised thunderclap hammered out across the cavern, and Zoey jerked up, in time to see a cloud of falling motes glitter in the increasingly-compressed torchlight. Minty swung the shotgun back towards the tunnelmouth, where the advancing wall of formless black seemed to be flowing faster, pouring into the cave in ankle-deep inky smudges, and her heart skipped a beat.

They'd figured out the tunnels.

“Sjin!” Lomadia darted over, with Nilesy lurching in her wake, and swung a hand down to the still-kneeling man. “C'mon, we're in an armoured-up minority here; we're going on point.”

Sjin opened his mouth, possibly to protest, but Nilesy cut him off.

“Bud, no carrying worries – I've got one working arm, and I'm promising – special underground peril temporary friendship offer: no holding of pool-related grudges until all this, y'know, _fleeing_ is sorted,” his voice was strained with pain and panic, but determined. Zoey hunched down, grabbing Sips' arm. He was heavier than she had expected – particularly for someone who had apparently left all his blood on various different thaumic planes – but Nilesy positioned himself under the other side, wincing as he adjusted angles around his bound injury, and they lurched forward together. It wasn't fast, or agile, but it _was_ moving.

Minty's shotgun went off again, this time followed by a deflating screech – but it didn't _stop,_ as more and more ender-voices joined the sound. She heard Tee growl, the scrape of claws on stone, and the dinosaur bounced past them, swivelling with reptilian grace every few steps to loose another arrow over their heads.

“Get to a tunnel!” Ravs shouted, above the rising din, as the shadows poured in, thickening around them and underfoot, until the cave seemed like little more than a tunnel already, their few remaining torches flickering wildly.

“Where to?” Lomadia brought her sword down through an arm-shape that unfolded towards them as she spoke, severing it in a burst of dying, blackened light.

“We're out of _to_ ,” Minty snapped, ducking under another grasp, and rammed the shotgun barrel hard into the seething darkness. “We're entirely on _from_ , right now. _Go!_ ”


	7. Ouroboros gambit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back at the castle. Revelation, retribution and the question of responsibility.

Cold white light filled the stark corridors within this part of the castle, harsh-cast from bright strips set into the panelled walls and from small bulbs that hung down in the gaps, below thick braids of wire that twisted like compound snakes along the roof. Some of the cables hummed gently, even through the insulation, and Rythian eyed the overhead bundles warily as he passed beneath. Some of the types he knew, from before, some were familiar from Zoey's own lab rooms, but others were... strange. Whatever they lead to was drawing power – a _lot_ of power.

He wanted to be wrong. The irony wasn't lost on him as he stalked along under the bleached-out glare of the lights; the one time it might have been better if Lalna actually was lying...

Xephos and his dwarf friend had taken it upon themselves to form a sort of nervous ambulatory wall between himself and the blasted scientist. Given that the corridor was only comfortably wide enough for two people walking abreast – and neither Rythian nor Lalna was about to put their back to the other – this was somewhat impeding progress. By the time they came to a heavily re-enforced steel door, the angry silence had clotted around them so thickly it was almost a physical pressure, and the faint bleep as Lalna peered into a small scanner seemed deafeningly loud.

The first set of doors slid apart, exposing another layer of darker metal – and Rythian lurched, unable to suppress a gasp as whatever shielding had been in place drew aside too, and the _feel_ of it hit him full-on. Every nerve seemed to burst into brief, painful brilliance, followed by a numb shiver that chased the breath from his lungs, and he clung grimly onto the wall, trying to stop his vision spinning. He was too open, senses stretched to even his limits as he had tried to find anything within the blocking-tomb of this place, and his knees buckled as he gritted his teeth, dragging his overloaded awareness back into himself.

“Yeah, I should've warned for that.” There was an edge of laughter in Lalna's voice and Rythian felt his cheeks flush slightly behind their mask.

Bastard. _Bastard_.

He tried to draw back some composure, but to his surprise a light pressure closed on his arm, steadying him, as he struggled back upright. Xephos' face swam into view, his brow knitted in unexpected concern.

“Alright there?”

“I'm fine.” Rythian shrugged off the grasp, blinking his vision back to normal, and hesitated. “...thanks.”

Lalna snorted, impatience in his tone, and Rythian didn't miss the slight glare in Xephos' direction as the bearded man stood back. He refocused his own glower on Lalna as the scientist leaned his other eye up to the scanner, and the second set of doors glided back. He was ready for the release this time, and strode forward into the wave of wrong-sense, so they both entered the room in near-heartbeat synchrony. He wasn't about to let Lalna get too far ahead, when -

He knew it. He _knew,_ and he froze anyway as he stepped through, out onto the lip of a shallow run of stairs. The revealed room was large, much larger than he had expected. The entwined river of cables flowed out above them, an overhead estuary of varyingly-insulted wire that crawled up the walls to the domed ceiling, and ran across the erratic network of gantries and precarious walkways stretched across the width of the space. Machine stacks jutted up through the cabling web, scrolling text and incomprehensible symbolic babble across dozens of integrated screens, linked together by more wire bundles as thick as his arm, that snaked through the metal shells and spooled on the floor beneath as if lying in wait for unwary footfalls.

Piles of assorted debris were shored up against most vertical surfaces; mechanical components, jars and crates and a hundred sizes and materials of boxes, some labelled, most not; but within the glass and metal and winking lights, he saw the more-familiar glitter of thaumaturgical constructs. To one side, an intertwined spiral of gold-thread honeycomb – a collector in its rawest form – twisted up around fine obsidian spirals, lit either side by more harsh lamps. Crystals spilled from precarious stacks over the flat-gleam of computer discs, and the air itself was heavy with static and the hot-tin prickle of magical fallout.

And in the centre of it all – the End portal hung in the air, spilling vapours of loose magic down its own sides.

Rythian stumbled forwards, gawking at what was at once the exact sight he had been dreading – and then a hundred times worse than that. The portal-stones glistened like a souring wound, the crystallised Eyes sunk into each key-stone pulsing gently, their multi-ringed pupils twitching to and fro as air currents stirred over the structure. Crimson light spilled up from below, where a high-sided metal tank had been set into the floor, mechanical stirrers shifting the pool of molten rock back and forth, folding cooler dark streaks back into the brilliant surface.

Was it the same one? His heart skipped a beat as his widened gaze tracked across the familiar shape – _so familiar, so damned familiar, but not_ here _, not now_ – and he lurched down the steps, as Lalna strode further into the horribly-blended room, a little more confidence settling back into his gait.

“Je _sus!_ ” Xephos stopped dead at the top of the stairs, but Honeydew pushed past him, his clanking footfalls headed towards Lalna, as the dwarf stomped past Rythian, waving his hands expressively.

“Seriously? This – this isn't the kind of shit Honeydew Inc funding is for! Didn't we say to _limit_ the mad science? I swear I said – ” the dwarf cut off, just as Rythian took another halting step and something gave a faint _click_ under his foot – and the world suddenly went muffled. He jerked back, rebounded, and impacted anyway as he came up short against the sudden curved glass wall that had shot up – blink-fast – around him.

The resulting jolt of panic was, oddly, something to focus on, and he set the void ring – but while the world shifted against him, it didn't seem to catch, and he gave a furious snarl.

“ _The hell Lalna?! Again?_ ” The tube – and it _was_ a tube, thick glass that turned the room into a refracted fish-bowl, a good few metres high – barely shivered under his hands as he slammed his fists into the sides, trying keep his breathing steady. Rage mingled with the rising threat of claustrophobia; rage at _himself_ , again, for just blithely walking into another one of _bloody_ Lalna's _bloody_ traps.

The scientist's faintly-distorted figure drifted back over towards him. He was grinning slightly, but with the current state of his face, the expression looked more than a little deranged.

_But I'm the warmonger, of course. Right._

“Yeah,” he said, voice coming in clearly from a small grill that had opened in the floor. “I probably should've warned for that too, actually. Easier to key it to just ignore me, you see.”

“Let. Me. Out,” Rythian snarled, but Lalna just patted the glass next to his face, and turned on one heel.

“Safer if you just... stay put.” He fished around in his labcoat, withdrew a flat silvery shape, and tapped it to his forehead in a parody of a salute. Rythian didn't have to growl that time – someone did it for him, and he glanced aside, surprised, at the second tube, which was full of angry dwarf.

“Sorry mate.” Lalna shrugged. “All on the one frequency. Plus you probably shouldn't touch anything either. No offence.”

“I'll sodding well offend you, you - ”

“Lalna...” Xephos hadn't moved from the stop of the stairs, his gaze flicking nervously between the suddenly-encased figures, the open floor, and the slightly-swaying scientist. “Friend, don't you think... isn't this a _bit_ on the side of... crazy?”

The expression dropped from Lalna's face, and his hollow features were suddenly a dull mask, unnerving in a whole new way. His sunken eyes turned up towards the other man, and narrowed slightly.

“No. I can _fix_ it, Xeph. You can help me,” he added, and swung round toward the nearest stack of machines. A large metal lever protruded from between a nest of screens, and Lalna wrapped his gloves fingers around the grip, swinging round to look up at the portal as he tugged his goggles back into place.

“It just needs a bit more work,” he declared, and wrenched down on the switch. Hydraulics shifted, somewhere up above the ceiling, and some of the gantries tilted or moved aside, as a new construct descended above the portal-frame. There was no sense to be made of the shapes there – tangled and twisted around and through each other, as though the multi-source debris from the floor had vomited up some horrible fusion of itself. Rythian's gaze widened further as there was another mechanical hiss, and angular shapes folded down like the the metallised legs of some outsize arachnid, the sharp spirals at their ends gleaming strangely as the white light of the room seemed to run oddly across their surface.

_What the hell is that?_

More things moved above the extended robotic limbs, but he couldn't pull his gaze away, as the tips dropped lower and lower – the Eyes flickering even more rapidly from side to side underneath – and sank deep into the widened pupils, with an unpleasant mechanical shiver. He _felt_ that, even in his current shielded prison, as the portal-stones shuddered, and steadying clamps swung down into place along the sides, as the lava underneath began to bubble furiously.

Behind him, Xephos gave a faint groan.

“What the _hell_ is that?”

“Interplanar laminal stabilisation array.” Lalna strode back over to a curved bench that was heavy with low screens; he dropped the remote onto the side and swiped his fingers across the largest monitor. Honeydew snorted.

“Oh, why didn't you just _say_ so?”

“It makes the portal stable,” the scientist translated, his attention not leaving the screen in front of him. “Or... it will. I've just got a few – a few - ” he stopped, pulled his goggles down again until they were hanging loose around his neck, and scrubbed at his face as he grimaced. “A few bits to iron. Out.”

“Lalna – ” Xephos had started making his way over to the edge of the stairs, looking warily at the floor. “ - when did you last sleep?”

“I'm fine.”

“You're so clearly not fine,” Honeydew snapped. “I'm in a _tube_ and I can see you're not fine. This is a whole new sort of not fine - ”

“I'm _fine_.” Lalna sent a bloodshot glare in the dwarf's direction, grabbed something hidden behind the console and twisted viciously. Electricity sparked down the length of the extended arms, and a thin, strangely-pitched keening sound caught up through the room as, one by one, the Eyes widened around the invading probes, and motes of dark-purple light began to flicker inside the frame.

“Nether portals are stable,” Lalna muttered, apparently to himself. “Polar, but stable. _This_ is a transplanar monopole.”

“Transplaining _what-_ nipple?” Honeydew banged on the glass as he spoke, but Rythian caught a quick flick of the dwarf's gaze. Xephos was advancing towards the nest of consoles, carefully hopping from one erratic stack of flanking boxes to the next to avoid the floor, but Lalna's increasingly-fragmented attention wasn't on him.

Was this a distraction? Even in the reeling chaos that his thoughts had descended into, Rythian felt a surprised flicker of respect. It might be idiocy, but it was actually targeted.

 _I just put on my sweet, innocent act, and he just fell for it!_ Zoey's words echoed at the back of his mind; the faint curl to her smile as she spoke, winking, and he caught onto the thought of her. A centre, something to focus on, as she ever was... He tightened his fingers against the glass.

“Transplanar monopole,” Lalna repeated, irritation in his voice as he glared at the source of the questions. “It means - ”

“It means there's no way back,” Rythian cut in, flatly. The scientist's hollow gaze switched to him, holding there with a sudden, uncomfortable intensity.

“Yes; it does. And isn't _that_ interesting, Rythian?” Lalna swung himself over the consoles again, stalking across the room, and brought his hands up abruptly to press gloved fingers against the glass either side of Rythian's face, as if framing him for closer inspection.

“Isn't that interesting?” he repeated, in a low breath, and slid one hand along, peering between his own splayed fingers. Rythian didn't move, and for a moment he was actually glad of the glass between them. Even before, even sealed in the shimmering force-globe in front of the gates, he hadn't got quite such a strong impression that the scientist was dissecting him with his eyes.

“Why would you even try... whatever this is meant to do?” he asked, quietly. Lalna shrugged.

“Power.”

“That's refreshingly honest,” Rythian sneered, and Lalna rolled his eyes as he stood back, gesturing up at the still-crackling array.

“ _Generating_ power.” He nodded to the ropes of cabling strung out overhead. “The energy difference between planes is incredible. Get a harness on that, and _bam_ \- ” he smacked one gloved fist into the other, a grin flickering across his face. “ - free energy; all you'd ever need. No waste, no mess.”

“Just a few little outbreaks of monster-ful apocalypses?” Honeydew snapped, and Lalna hesitated, swaying slightly again.

“...teething problems. I _can_ fix it.” There was a layer of almost-painful insistence in his voice, and he caught onto one of the machine stacks, rubbing furiously at the bridge of his nose. “I – I've just got to think - ”

The background whine notched up another increment. There was a new shiver in the air – not quite a sound, but a change to some _other_ pressure, as the sparking motes poured into the centre of the frame – and the portal caught. A sheet of darkness spread across the open space, like oil on a mirror, and Rythian's heart missed a beat.

 _Was_ it the same one? Did it matter? He swallowed back the acid in his throat as his gaze pinned to the sight, that so-familiar slice of infinity, everything he remembered – even here, under the unforgiving lights of Lalna's scrambled lab.

There had been scuttling in the darkness back then, insectile chittering and the scrape of shell against stone, but all beneath him, hidden in the pitch-thick blackness of the distant floor. The only real light was lavalight, spilling fire-born shadows across the cracked stone walls, but the sheet of sectioned midnight cast its own brilliance. It wasn't light, barely even allied with light - an unforgiving alien brightness that repelled and drew at the very heart of him with equal measure.

He remembered the feel of it. The lightest of touches as his fingers had dipped through the surface, and the dreadful blankness that followed as not even sensation came back. There was no pain; even pain needed nerves to fire, signals to return, and there was no path here. He remembered his own fear, icy-black against the raw assurance that had carried him there – but over it all, he remembered the dreadful, icarian curiosity as he had leaned closer...

_Isn't that interesting, Rythian?_

Lalna muttered something unintelligible and lurched over to another panel, this one covered in a ridiculous variety of dials and apparently wired into the floor. He twisted the largest, and more slender shapes folded down from the crowded array; these were thinner, hook-ended things, curled with the pale turquoise spirals of alchemical markings, and the curved tips swivelled from side to side as they descended towards the portal surface. Lalna squinted at the new movement, frowned, and half-made to turn back towards the console stack; Xephos froze, awkwardly wedged between two angled crates, as he made a frantic gesture towards his friend.

“Oi!” the dwarf grumbled again, visibly searching for a conversation hook; but Lalna wasn't listening, his gaze sliding from dial to dial as he slowly turned.

“Is there nothing you won't pervert with your damned science?” Rythian cut in. That got a reaction, as Lalna let out a frustrated growl and swivelled back towards him, anger flushing the sides of his face.

“ _Still?_ Really, still this? Don't you live with a – a 'technomage'?” An unpleasant sneer curled his lip as he stalked back towards the immobilised figures. “Or is that just hypocrisy-with-benefits?”

Rythian bristled, and his fingers curled so hard against his rings that he rose slightly in the air as flight reacted to the pressure. Lalna laughed; his own hand twitched and he stepped out of gravity's hold, arms held out slightly either side as if trailing in a hidden breeze.

“You don't know what you're missing, Rythian,” he said, brightly, as a grin twisted up around his features. “The possibilities- ”

“You're insane,” Rythian spat back _,_ his clenched fists pressed so hard against the glass that new pain bloomed across his knuckles. “You're trying to use the _End_ as – as a _battery!_ That's – even for _science_ , that's - ”

“ _Everything is science!_ ” Lalna's voice rose into a yell, anger sparking off each word, and he shot forward again until they were face-to-face, gazes locked like furious magnets. He tore off one glove, and rapped his bare knuckles against the glass. “Technology,” he said, bluntly, as if talking to a particularly stupid child, then wiggled his fingers in front of Rythian's eyes, so the bluish-metal band there gleamed in the light. “Magic. Repeatable, observable, _predictable_ effects – it's all bloody science, where _you_ like it or not.”

“Predictable?” Rythian's fingers scrabbled at the glass, as he tried to swallow a wordless cry of rage. “You call this madness _predictable?_ ”

“ _I can_ _ **fix**_ _it!_ ” Lalna shot backwards as if propelled by his own shout, swivelling in the air as he rose in front of the portal-frame, and slammed his still-gloved hand along an array of what initially had looked like polished crystal, now clearly buttons, and the hook-ended arms plunged downward.

As twisted-alchemical tips bit into the portal surface, the howling began – a sonic rupture that spilled out of the injured surface with a force that made Rythian wince. He hit the ground, clutched at his hand as the rings burned like ice against his skin, and grasped for Enderbane – countering one intrusion with another as the pain shifted back to the more familiar, his klein star buzzing with displeasure under his throat. Lalna shuddered in the air and jabbed at the buttons again, swaying erratically, his lips drawn back in a rictus grimace as the not-light brilliance cast writhing shadows across his face.

Behind him, Xephos made the final leap from a wobbling stack of steel-and-glass coils, and landed at the side of the console stack. He froze for a moment, but when nothing sprouted out of the floor beneath him, reached over and snatched up the remote. Honeydew made an impatient noise, beckoning frantically, and caught Rythian's gaze with a warning glare of his own. Xephos fumbled, looked up – and all the colour drained out of his face, his mouth dropping into a circle of horror as he stared behind Lalna's hovering figure, to where the surface of the portal was heaping up on itself, a serrated stalagmite of roiling blackness rising out of the assaulted frame.

“Lalna! Behind you!” Xephos yelled, but the scientist turned towards the shout, his face a mask of surprise as he saw the little silver shape in his friend's hand. Behind him the darkness split apart, and a claw like veined jet struck out towards the closest shape. It was only angle that saved him, the portal frame unmoving even under that blow, but even the trailing tip dug a long slice into Lalna's unsuspecting back. He screamed – a short, harsh sound that lit a dozen long-healed wounds across Rythian's own body with the unwantedly-sympathetic echo of old agonies. He _knew_ that pain, the void-born touch of the End's Queen that cut away flesh into howling, empty nothing

Lalna spasmed in the air, his outflung hand twitching violently, and Rythian saw the glint at his fingers as all that assaulted power found somewhere to release. There was no time to shout, no time to even move, as injured magic crackled into life around Lalna's bare fingers, and a jagged bolt of raw lightning burst across the room, earthing into the consoles with an explosion of sparks that blew out screens and hurled Xephos backwards into an avalanche of assorted debris.

The tube vanished, snapping back into the floor as suddenly as it had arrived, and Rythian shot upward, drawing the blade – ignoring Honeydew's yell, ignoring Lalna as the scientist dropped gracelessly to the floor, his face contorted – and his world narrowed to the sight of that claw, as more seething darkness piled up around it and even the portal frame shuddered under an unseen impact. Enderbane burned like a frozen star under his fingers and he brought the blade down with desperate precision. He swallowed his own yelp as the pain took hold, old wounds unzipping as the cold-shearing edge cut deep, but he _felt_ the blow take. The clawing grasp jerked away, wounded, and sank back beneath the seething portal surface. One of the alchemical arms had been shattered, and the pattern they hooked into the darkness twisted erratically, but nothing was coming _out_ of it anymore. For now.

“No-no-no no no - ”

Lalna was hunched over the still-sparking consoles, a dark stain spreading steadily across the back of his coat. He skimmed his fingers frantically over the blown-out remains, clutching at either side of the main screen, and shook at the cracked frame. Behind him, Honeydew hefted aside a huge, bent spiral of silvery metal as he grimly pried his crumpled friend out of the still-shifting debris. Xephos was groaning – erratic scorch patterns had sketched across the front of his clothes, and bits of his thin beard were smouldering slightly – but he managed to look up as Rythian flickered in beside him and leaned down, adding his own hand to the extraction process.

There was dazed blur to the man's blue gaze, and a thin line of blood was working down from somewhere in his hairline, but he fixed Rythian an almost-focused stare as they pulled him back upright.

“Just – don't kill him –” he muttered, thickly, and caught Rythian's wrist with an insistent squeeze. “- friend.”

He lost the grip and stumbled back against Honeydew, blinking owlishly. Rythian left them figuring out combinational standing and turned on his heel. Lalna was still braced up against his ruined consoles, knuckles white, head down. His arms were shaking, and he didn't even move as Rythian stepped in behind him, less than a metre away from the scientist's unprotected spine. A dozen different futures seemed to hang in the air around them, separated by a chance's breath.

 _I started this_.

Rythian's gaze tracked up to the portal frame, where the violated surface was starting to boil again. The thought was a whirlpool in his mind, dragging everything else around itself until he was teetering on the last fragment of _now_ , future and past yawning around him like awaiting jaws.

_And if I had never told you, my once-friend? If I had gone there alone; would you ever have thought of this?_

He felt the mark of it all, then, as he hadn't done for years. The cold light that burned under his eyes, the healed-over twists beneath his flesh that would never be truly gone.

_If I never had come back?_

The sword pressed against him and his own long-past words echoed back, almost mocking. It had been so long since he had actually spoken of _any_ of it. Even when dragonfire runes had burned into his own castle walls, when Zoey had asked, in her blunted roundabout way – he had blustered and diverted. Too hard to explain, not important now, something he would deal with later, if at all.

Enderbane shivered against him as he raised the blade. It made a faint sound, like steel on glass, but Lalna didn't try to move away – if anything, he slumped a little further forward. He was so close, so _close_ that Rythian could hear his shallow breathing. So close, as time slowed, and all the shimmering fragments of future condensed into one razor, ice-chill edge.

The blow was deafeningly loud, somehow, in the strung-out room. Lalna flinched, his head jerked aside – as his gaze fell onto the sword, slammed down flat onto the ruined console beside him.

_This isn't your absolution, Lalna. But you're certainly not mine._

“You can't fix this, can you?” Rythian said softly, leaning forward until they were level, and he could feel the scientist's disbelief drilling into him. Lalna let out a tight breath.

“...no.” His voice was quiet. “I... I didn't expect...” he trailed off, and suddenly crumpled, sliding down the side of the console as his legs gave out. Rythian caught his arm – before he could actually notice the _insanity_ of his own action – and guided him down, until Lalna was leaning awkwardly against one side, hunched over his own knees. His eyes were red, puffy at the edges, and he stared – unseeing – at the floor. Rythian gave a little hiss of irritation.

“This is a very bad time to freak out.” He caught Lalna's wrists, ignoring the faint insistence that he should be gripping the man's throat instead, and shook him. “ _Lalna_. What was your insurance?”

The bloodshot eyes blinked, stupidly.

“What?”

“ _Insurance_ ,” Rythian growled, twitching his fingers like quotes in the air. “Like I believe you haven't got a damn nuke wired up in here _somewhere_.”

Lalna blinked again. Then, moving like a man in a trance, he dug his bare fingers into his tattered labcoat and withdrew another remote. This one was black, with a couple of bright green buttons set into the matte surface, and he stared at it blankly.

“'S not a nuke, really,” he muttered. “Too... messy. Awful lot of radiation.”

“But it _is_ a bomb, right?” Rythian took the remote from the scientist's unresisting grasp, carefully, holding it between his own thumb and forefinger. For something that likely commanded such explosive force, it was unpleasantly light in his hand. Lalna snorted.

“Want to blow up my castle now?”

“Sounds fair enough to me,” Rythian cut back. “Why are there three?”

“This - ” Lalna reached out a slightly-shaking hand, hovering his finger over the topmost button. “- turns off the outer forcefield. This turns on an inner one, around this room. And this - ” the fingertip caressed the largest button a little too closely for comfort, and Rythian pulled it away “ - activates the bomb. Countdown of ten. But it won't work.” There was a different, leaden edge to his voice now, and Rythian frowned.

“Why not?”

“Don't you think I _tried_ that?” Lalna snapped, his gaze sharpening a little more, and he gave an accusatory jab towards the portal frame. “Moving that thing whole took forever, but I had to, because it doesn't break down. Nothing scratches it, nothing _damages_ it, and the power isn't even bloody on right now, and it's staying open. I don't know if I even _can_ blow it up. And I normally know that!”

“You probably can't.” Rythian yanked Lalna upright with him as he stood back up, and shoved the scientist back against the wrecked remains of his console. He looked around, running the possibilities again.

This _was_ crazy.

“Get them out of here,” he said, nodding to where the other two figures were watching them warily, as if they were expected to personally explode at any moment. Lalna blinked, peering up at Rythian through the damp curtain of his ragged fringe, his sunken eyes twitching and edged with surprise.

“What're you playing at?”

“You don't get to ask me that,” Rythian snapped. “ _We_ are not finished. Keep that in mind.”

The scientist looked as if he was about to argue, but another wrong-edged sound from the writhing portal cut his words in a wince; he gaped for a few seconds before lurching over to another machine stack, and pressed something behind it. There was a faint _snap-hiss_ of shifting pressure, and a rectangular piece of floor to one side of the room tilted itself downward into darkness. Honeydew snorted.

“Your mad secret lab has literally got a fucking _escape tunnel?_ We should've brought pitchforks.” He adjusted the dazed angle that Xephos was leaning on him, and they started towards the revealed door, meandering slightly. Rythian watched them start to descend, then strode over to where Lalna was slumped against the machine stack, his forehead pressed against the metal surface.

“You too,” he ordered. “If this doesn't work, you are going to need to think _very_ fast.”

Lalna didn't move. He was breathing sharply again, his fists clenched tight and shaking. Rythian gave a small growl of annoyance. If the bastard was finally going to have a breakdown, he could at least wait until a more convenient time. He grabbed the man's shoulder and yanked him round again.

“This isn't - ” he started, then Lalna's bare hand snaked up and caught around his own wrist, his fingers tight with an urgency that didn't reach his eyes. There was something there though, a strange look in the bloodied stare – imploring, almost, seen through a broken lens.

“Rythian...” he muttered, his voice thickened with exhaustion. “Would it... help? If I said – if I was _sorr_ \- ” he cut off, the word catching in his throat, and myriad expressions flickered across his hollowed-out features. He half made to speak again, then stopped, absently rubbing at his neck where the cut from the sword's edge was a dark line against his skin. Rythian didn't move.

“Are you?” he asked, quietly. He wasn't perfectly sure what they were talking about – or rather, exactly what _part_ – but it didn't matter. All that they were now, all that either had once been, or had done. He already knew the answer.

The moment hung, poised on inevitability – and Lalna's lips twitched into a thin smile, as he shook his head.

“No.”

“Get out.” Rythian pulled free, turning away as Lalna's hand fell back limply to his side and he stumbled towards the waiting trap door. He vanished downward, and Rythian stepped back into the air, drawing a little comfort from the faint sense of magic that brushed across his body as he surveyed the emptied room.

How long did he have? The impossible thinness of the portal surface was rippling like boiling tar, but nothing was forcing through yet, and there was a faint sense of alien... wariness, almost, to the movements. He had hurt her; he knew that, and she would be waiting for his next move.

Would it be enough? He counted heartbeats under his breath, trying to imagine the fleeing group's progress through whatever unknown tunnels underlaid this place. He thought of the rips in the sky, the other _-_ way portals, as the End poured through, searching – for _this_ place, not for him, this time. When she had last come for him, it had been a minor avatar, but this all-encompassing assault was something else.

Would they believe it – deep in the void-twisted malice of mind that drove the End-born – that thief and defiler had been one and the same? As he now played sleight of hand with a rip between worlds; conjury with blame, and with no advantage of surprise this time. His fingers tightened once more against the sword hilt, as he rose up towards the seething slice of nothingness, and set his jaw.

_I started this._

_And I End it._

\---

“Move!”

The yells could have pierced stone, mirrored beneath the ravaged landscape. From the dwarf, half-carrying one friend and dragging the other; one stumbling under the wings of concussion; the other counting exhaustion-leaded steps against some internal map, his hidden eyes wet-bright in the subterranean gloom. From the bartender, unleashing the final volley of leaden pellets across a blacked-out tunnel, feeling hammer clang on empty chamber as even her heart sank towards despair. From the pair of figures still caught about with scalded dust, as they struck back at the choke-points ahead of injured friends and unexpected allies, and as their defences started to crack apart.

As congealing darkness wound its way down the sheltering basalt arteries, swarming with eyes cold-bright in the thickened night; so compressed now that it is impossible see where one shape began and another ended, or where the crude-slick air was empty.

As every retreat met unyeilding stone, and every bloody grip tightened on weapons and improvisations already wearing thin.

As even the fear ran out.

\---

That would have to be long enough. Rythian hung in front of the portal and drew a long breath as he held out the little plastic rectangle, his thumb hovering over the first button. There was no turning on this; no second choices. He just had to hope that they had got far enough away; the odd bearded pair that spoke like fools but wore veteran steel beneath their eyes. And even Lalna. As fitting as it would be if the scientist finally met his own reckless fate close up, part of him still wanted a hand in deciding it.

A thin smile twitched his shrouded lips as he drifted over the frame, the assaulted Eyes still twisting against their pinning spirals to follow him, almost accusingly. He remembered that multiple-stare – goading, challenging – remembered it pressed up against him so hard he had _felt_ it, dragging static-attention down his skin; daring him. There was no daring this time, only a simmering anger, and – just occasionally – a faint flicker of worried attention towards the blade at his hip.

The first button clicked under his thumb, and he felt the shift as the swarming crowds of endermen outside surged forward, their impediment cleared. He pressed the next, and the harsh-white lights went out, leaving the room lit only by the crimson lavalight and the otherworldly brilliance of the portal. A small green bulb labelled 'aux' began to flash gently on the side of the remote, and he had to assume that meant the second field was working.

 _I suppose it's a change to be forcefielding_ myself _in with a bomb_.

Zoey would laugh at that; and worry about him; and tease him about it, when it was over.

He swung himself over the portal surface, until the heels of his boots hung hairsbreadth-close, and drew his stolen sword.

“I'll come back,” he repeated, as he felt the third small dome under his touch, and the memory of her grin – glinting in fire, sun or screen-glow, from whatever had occupied her erratic focus that day – rose across his vision. It was a little glimmer of real light, set deep across his heart, to take with him again into the nightmare and he curled himself around it.

He pressed the last button, ignoring the sudden blare of emergency alarms as he twisted in the air, and swept the sword's ice-sharp edge around in a long arc. Impervious to anything Lalna had tried, untouched by time or weathering, or any force of this-world attrition – the Eyes ruptured like old fruit as Enderbane cut into their glistening surfaces. White-hot pain sparkled up his arm as Rythian completed the swing, and the liberated rotten-emerald slime oozed thickly over the sides of each stony socket, dripping caustic globs into the lava below and pulling strange patterns into the molten surface.

There was no sound – not real sound – but there was a multi-part howl of _something_ else, battering up against his mind like a rising storm of frozen shrapnel. He wrapped his arms around the blade, pulling it flat against his chest, and dropped like a dart towards the already-shrinking square of wrong-textured blackness – as something began to sizzle in the roof above.

Last time, he'd had nothing but his own blunt refusal to die; a raw, bloody determination to claw through to his return by any and all means, to a world that had never quite been what he had left behind.  This time, he had something to come back _for_.

It might even be enough.

\---


	8. Resemblance of normality

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aftermath, of various kinds

It was the silence that she noticed first.

This was followed in rapid succession by the realisations that something in the vicinity of her right hand hurt like hell, she was fairly sure she was lying on someone else's legs – and that these things were entirely, utterly impossible because they suggested strongly that she was still alive. After a few moments of hesitant breathing, and a growing suspicion that if there was going to be an afterlife, it was unlikely to be quite so chiropractically-uncomfortable, Lomadia gingerly inched one eyelid open.

There was a dinosaur staring at her. This was far enough outside her usual awaking vision that she blinked, squinted, and sat up, into a personalised symphony of pain and enraged muscles. She gasped, winced as her ribs blazed in protest, and scrambled her aching fingers at the clasps on her armour until she managed to get a grip under the outer plates and dislodge them. The panels were universally twisted, bent in at odd angles and in some places the material had been half-swept aside, as if something had made good headway into simply _wiping_ the armour off her. The armguards seemed to have melted over their own clasps, but were at least a more normal shape, and she heaved herself aside when the last restricting-plate fell clear, mildly glorying in sudden lung capacity.

A low groan brought her attention back to the shape previously beneath her, and she looked down. Sjin was slumped out across the uneven floor, twitches of consciousness creeping back onto his features. He looked as bad as she felt – most of the front of his armour was gone, torn open like cardboard, with little bits of wiring and broken bracing hanging down across the gap. The fabric underneath was in bloody tatters, angry abrasions following the tears in the material, and one of his eyes were swollen shut, but he groaned again, louder this time, and the other lid flickered open.

“...h-hey Lom,” he managed, struggling up onto his elbows, and a few more fragments of ruined armour fell off. “Gonna be a bit cliché, but... we are _alive_?”

“Think so. And no, I've no idea why, either.” Lomadia carefully eased herself up onto her knees, and after a few false starts managed to straighten up into a vaguely-stable hunch. She tried to remember anything clear from before, but the most recent memories were a horrible, desperate blur of pain and panic, and she gave up trying to sift through them in detail. They had got this far, to this dead-end cluster of tunnels, and she vaguely recalled hustling other figures into the narrowing cavern behind them, bracing herself again Sjin's shoulder as they filled the space with themselves and the lights began to fail -

_Well, we're clearly insane. Did it work, though?_

The dinosaur was still watching her, torch in his mouth, his head tilted so one half of his slit-pupil gaze could fix on her face. He looked fairly banged-up too, with raw wounds bright against his scales, particularly around his jaw, but the stare seemed focused enough.

“Is... anyone else...?” the words wouldn't form, not properly, and Lomadia tried not to think of all the ways that the answer could come. The inscrutable therapodian gaze tracked across her again – then turned, very obviously, over to where Sjin was incrementally dragging himself into a more upright slouch. Finally, the watcher's head tilted forward and he turned, a little awkwardly in the narrow space, and began to limp back down the tunnel. The torchlight was going with him, so Lomadia helped Sjin fully onto his feet, and they swayed off together after the retreating shape.

The low murmur of voices was quite possibly the most welcome sound that she had ever heard, and they stumbled round another molten-sweep corner, into a new little triage universe of torchlight. This cave was also blunt-ended, the roof sloping down so steeply that there was barely room to hunch over, let alone stand, and relief hit like a sledgehammer as Lomadia focused on the various figures scattered around the uneven floor; battered, and bloody, but breathing.

“Christ,” she muttered, and felt Sjin tighten his supporting grip around her waist, her own knees buckling as some of the remaining horrible tension that had been keeping her upright drained away.

“Tee, you found them! Awesome!.” The voice seemed incongruously bright in the gloom, and Lomadia blinked as Zoey appeared in front of her, catching her arm, and began to steer their stooped, slanted way across the cave.

“Everyone's here?” she muttered, peering round, as her more urgent searching glance met the small wave from Nilsey, propped against the opposite wall. Dizziness was creeping in around the edges of her thoughts, and she let herself be lowered to the floor in a clear space nearby, leaning gratefully back against the rock.

She should be more worried. Respite was good, but she remembered her sword finally shattering in her grip, remembered the lines of pain as even slight ender-touch broke through her failing armour, and above it all the dreadful pressure of the thick darkness, pursuing them even down here...

...which was gone.

She looked up, quickly, and met Zoey's gaze. The firelight cast odd shadows across the mage-woman's face, her expression unusually serious as Lomadia read the same understanding in her eyes.

“They're gone.” It wasn't a question. Zoey nodded, then hesitated, chewing at her lip.

“Yeah. I think he - ” she stopped again and looked upwards, as if she could see through the rock overhead. “- I guess it stopped. So that's good.” Her voice shook, ever so slightly, but Lomadia didn't have the energy to pull apart all the layers of meaning there, and just went for a nod.

“I dunno about you - ” Nilsey muttered, leaning over as Zoey turned away towards another small knot of figures “ - but I'm done with today. Fuck today, _honestly,_ I mean; like tomorrow? Will have to try so hard to be worse than today.”

“Could be creepers tomorrow.” Lomadia let her attenion stray back across the room. Impossibly, amazingly – they were all here. _Almost all_ , the cold space at the back of her mind reminded, and her lips thinned, chastising herself. Zoey was right – the darkness had gone. Somehow. And it sure as hell hadn't been any of them that had done it. Her gaze lingered on the low-burning torches, wedged into the walls wherever there was room.

_You'd best have kept yourself intact out there, you bloody idiot._

“Oh, don't even joke.” Nilsey shivered, winced and shifted his arm carefully. “I'm entirely ready for back to normal right now.”

A faint grin eased onto Lomadia's lips as she leaned back, letting her eyelids slide closed again.

“Normal where I need to round up two dozen owls larger than my house? Or normal where you read bedtime stories to a volcano?”

“Exactly. Normal.”

\---

The torches finally ran out, just before they reached the surface again. Limping, stumbling, half-carrying each other – the battered group followed Tee and the last golem back along tracks they must have taken before, half-seen in the subterranean gloom. At least this darkness was a mere absence of light, awkward but no more intrinsic a threat than sideglance shadows and exhausted imagination could conjure, and began to fade with the faintest filtering glow as they wound upwards.

They at last emerged, blinking, as the first rays of dawn broke over the mountains. The landscape was an upturned toybox of toppled forest and scattered stone, raw with new scars where a particularly large tree had come down, but the sky was _sky_ again, whole and blue and threaded through with fine clouds. A bark soon echoed around the rocky outcrops, and a furry pair of eager shapes dodged around clumps of earth and fallen branches, darting out to meet them, as the eager sound dislodged a spiralling flurry of small birds from the intact canopy.

The world came back, as if had never been gone.

That afternoon, scouting carefully along the coastal cliffs a few miles east, Minty saw the boat.

\---

Blackrock never really seemed to get finished, in any of its incarnations. Zoey leaned over the upper walkway, running a critical eye along the still-ragged shapes of the outer battlements. She had initially shored up most of the major new holes, the torn-open structural weaknesses and particularly-hazardous missing bits of floor, slowly replacing spider-deterring scaffolding with smooth black bricks once more. It had been slow going. As much as Tee might have tried to help, he wasn't exactly built for lifting, or any task that specifically needed thumbs – and she had eventually persuaded the limping dinosaur to sit watch instead. Heavy construction hadn't really been her thing either, if she was honest, but it wasn't as if she had had many other obvious options.

She'd been wrong about that. They had parted ways from the temporary aggregation of situational allies as soon as it had seemed reasonable to do so – after the boat had landed, and _that_ confirmation had arrived – and made their way back to the castle ruins. She hadn't expected anything else, as the broken walls had bled out their conspicuously so-empty silence, and she began to forge distraction from the necessary work.

A few days later, the dwarf and his friend turned up. Zoey had been woken from dreams she preferred to forget by hammering and hollering, and the sound of Tee's warning snarl, drifting in through one of the more minor holes in the bedroom wall. She had hurried out – fumbling the spare star around her neck, stomach in knots – to find the HoneydewInc directorship standing in the ruins of her farm, tooled up for building, and being lightly grazed by her missing mooshrooms.

Apparently the funal creatures 'weren't all that different to pigs, if you know pigs, right?'. The taller man – Xephos – had tried to give a little more explanation, although rather tangled himself up in halting politeness, and the pair had then busied themselves shifting fallen masonry and reclaiming intact brickwork. When they had left, trailed out by a variety of slightly awkward assurances that H.Inc was seriously reviewing contractor activities (and that she could certainly consider the complimentary discount on any products), she found a sizeable box of their signature cakes balanced on the remains of the kitchen counter.

It was carefully hand-labelled: 'Totally suitable for vegaterians, ~~hardly any pork that you'd notice at all.'~~

That had just been the start.

“Is this a good idea, d'you think?” Lomadia leaned on the rail beside her; unarmoured now, clad instead in a blue tunic and an elbow-length falconry glove so re-enforced it clinked as she moved. She tucked a strand of hair into her cap as she looked up, squinting in the sunlight. High above them, a distant figure did another erratic aerial loop and a faint whoop of glee drifted down. Zoey grinned.

“It's cool, really. I've lost, like, three of those, so got the hang of making them ages ago.”

Lomadia laughed.

“I was more wondering when we're going to start hearing about sky pools. Magic help is good though.” She held up her own bare hand, where feathery white scars like fine lightning traced down from the band on one finger, surrounded by still-pink smoothness of new skin, and she flexed the digits. “Got a bit wary after my spazzing-out in the Nether situation.”

They watched the newly-airborne pool-man slowly get to grips with reasonable flight paths.

“Only fair, you helped with the walls.” Zoey peered down at the nearest slightly-visible seal in the building. “Nice.”

“No worries. Turns out they barely touched my actual base. Bonus of building quite so far underground, I suppose.”

“Under here's... reserved,” Zoey hesitated. “For future, awesome stuff, and lots of things that don't involve any sort of explosions at all. And the mushroom dorms, y'know, for volunteers. Sips' sent us a crate of fancy dirt the size of a truck, so that'll help there, I guess?”

Lomadia shrugged and shielded her eyes as she leaned back again, watching as Nilsey executed a near-perfect loop and gave another yell of triumph. When she spoke, her voice was low, and more serious than her up-pointed expression.

“I never said thank you. For looking after him.”

Zoey blinked, and her cheeks flushed slightly.

“Uh-um... I mean, he did break an arm...” she cut off, as Lomadia's other hand landed on her shoulder and squeezed gently.

“One fewer person to worry about, while I was blithering around burning off my eyebrows? Really – thank you.”

“Xephos came over the other week,” Zoey said, quickly, and the other woman shook her head.

“Faffing about? Honestly, I think he enjoys having something to fret over.”

She decided to go for blunt.

“Yeah... but he _is_ the one you were - ?”

“There's less worrying needed, there,” Lomadia cut her off, not unkindly, and a tight expression flickered, across her face. “He's been... doing all that, long before me.”

“You still _do_ though, right?” Zoey asked quietly, quite aware of the clustering meanings either side of her actual words. “Even if... it's totally, y'know, their _thing_ and all; you still -?”

“Yes.” Lomadia closed her eyes, and a thin smile curled at her lips. “Every damn time.”

The moment stretched, layering over itself with the weight of half-said things, then Lomadia let out a long breath and caught Zoey's gaze, a different grin swapping into prime place.

“Anyway. I think Nilesy's got the basics now.” She flexed her fingers and stepped into the air, rising over the rail. “And I'm getting rusty. Shall we show him how it's really done?”

\---

She wasn't totally sure if she had been expecting him. Over a month had passed since the caves, and Zoey was sat cross-legged, leaning back against the condenser with a mess of wires and assorted components spread out on the floor in front of her, fiddling with one of her powergloves. She had just inserted a tricky new capacitor – grinning in triumph as the angular pattern of small green lights lit up again stronger than before – when there was a blare of angry sound from outside, both reconstituted golems making deep, alarm-like noises. She dropped the screwdriver and scrambled upright, skidding through the corridors to the main door, and sent a thread of awareness out before her.

She had gotten pretty good at that.

The sense that came back was almost – _almost_ – a surprise, and she slowed to a more reasonable pace, pushing her 'tech goggles up onto her forehead in a pile of red hair and green screen. The rebuilt front doors swung open and she strode out, surreptitiously pressing a couple of small buttons at her wrist as she moved. The golems quietened down as she approached, their blocky heads tilted upwards and gleaming scarlet even in the afternoon light, attention focused furiously towards the figure hovering out of pummelling range a few metres up in the air.

“Hi, Zoey.”

She felt the klein star shiver at her chest, spreading a faint sensation of rising magic down her arm, and peered up at the hanging figure.

“'Sup, Lalna,” she replied, calmly, and nodded to the seething golems. “Let him down, okay?”

Both metallic figures backed away, fists still swinging angrily, and Lalna touched down lightly on the end of the main stairs. He looked better than the last time she had seen him – although, admittedly, that wasn't hard, given she had first assumed he was actually dead in the boat, slumped against Honeydew's knees. His labcoat was new; his hair clean and unusually well-controlled under the straps of the goggles pushed up into it; and his face was again a colour you might expect to see on a human rather than, say, something gone rancid. He stood rather stiffly, slanted against the likely still-healing wound down his back, and was holding a large cardboard box over his chest. He looked at her over it, warily.

“Thanks.”

“Don't.” Zoey curled her wrists round, palms up, and twitched her fingers. A small flame caught over her bare skin, dancing in the breeze, and a coin-sized circular plate on the glove lit up, as the air above it began to shimmer hazily, accompanied by a faint, rising pitch of charging power. “I wouldn't want _them_ getting hurt.”

Lalna's gaze tracked from one hand to the other, and a thin, mirthless smile crept onto his lips.

“Got your defences, then?”

“Nope; this is more a threat,” she replied, bluntly. “What d'you want?”

“I... brought you this.” He took a few more steps, and stopped as an arrow appeared in the ground by his feet. Zoey didn't blink. He put the box down and tipped it towards her with the end of one boot, until she could see the contents. Tight rolls of computer print-out and bright stacks of discs were packed against thick leafs of paper, haphazardly stapled together. There were a few jars under the first layer too, and she could swear she saw something move behind the glass.

“What's it meant to be?”

Lalna let the box tip back, and took a step away, looking down at the contents with a momentarily wistful glimmer in his eyes.

“My backups. And the backups, of the backups. And notes and things. Everything I've got left on... that little disaster.”

A spike of ice twisted in her chest, and she tried to keep the feel of it off her face. Stay cool, that was the deal. Lalna was watching her closely, his expression very carefully blank, but his eyes kept flicking between her hands and Zoey snapped her fingers closed, extinguishing both flares. She probably wasn't going to actually _shoot_ him, anyway, and her blowgun was somewhere upstairs.

Gosh, though it was tempting, right about now.

“And I'm gonna do what, with this?” She gestured to the box. Lalna shrugged.

“Anything you want. It's a bit... complicated, but you'd get it quick enough.”

Zoey's eyes narrowed.

_Really? This – really?_

“What do you _want_ , Lalna?”

She blinked, surprised, as the scientist suddenly let out a burst of laughter and swivelled round, sitting down heavily on a fence with his forehead in his hands. His expression didn't match the sound, a tight grimace that spread across his face like a slow burn, and he drummed his fingers against his hairline.

“I want – I _want_ to be sorry,” he muttered, as he stared at the ground, and hesitated. “I never – I didn't mean, not _really.._. There's just so much to figure out, you know? So much to try, to push at. When something works, or it doesn't but you know how to _make_ it, and going wrong's just part of that process. I just...” he trailed off again and one hand went to his throat, idly tracing gloved fingertips down some unseen line there as he turned back towards her. “I didn't expect it to go _that_ wrong. Not for me. Or anyone else, I guess.”

Zoey stared at him, trying to get anything useful from the rather tangled words, or his expression – which didn't seem to be able to decide what it wanted to be either, and twitched at odd bits of his face as he watched her, clearly searching for a reaction.

_There're times I'm not all-the-way sure on the non-violence thing._

“You're kinda terrible at apologies,” she noted, moving over a little until she had the box more firmly between them. Lalna held up a hand, wincing slightly.

“I'm not trying - I never really _got_ apologies. At the time there's always too much happening; and after, doesn't seem an awful lot of point. It's all in the past. Best move on – okay!” he added quickly, as the rising whine of Zoey's glove cut the air again, and held up his other hand too, placating. “Bad phrasing.”

“People. Nearly died,” Zoey said, through suddenly-gritted teeth, impressed by the venom in her own voice, as a ball of burning anger uncurled in her mind, drifting little sparks of several-source rage through her thoughts. She bit back on the surge of words that rose in her throat, half-bidden, and tried to still the trembling in her fingers. Lalna spread his hands open in front of him in some infuriating parody of a calming gesture.

“They're fine though. Sips is fine; I checked. Limping, yeah, but I can fix that, and he's having fun terrorising Sjin with a cane. Your thing worked.”

“Y'know – if you're trying to bait me, you're doing an _awesome_ job here,” she snapped. “So, right, you can take your big box of amazingly bad ideas and - ”

“He came back before.”

Whatever reaction Lalna had been expecting from that, it apparently wasn't for her to stride forward and jab a gloved finger hard enough into his chest to take his balance, sending the surprised scientist toppling backwards into the grass. He looked up, blinking between his own upturned feet as Zoey slammed her hands down on the vacated fence and snarled at him.

“Yeah, I got _that_ far, thanks. And I don't want to hear any ominous nonsense. I don't even care. Whatever it was you did, whatever – he – is, _he_ will tell me. When he wants to. Not you.”

She stood back, breathing quickly, as Lalna got to his feet. His expression had gone strange again, and as he winced as his wounded shoulder took weight.

“It's not actually possible," he muttered, almost sulkily. "None of my calculations, none of my work, even _this_ time – there's no way to do it. None. Nada. Not a chance.”

“Endermen do.” Zoey swept a bit of loose hair out of her eyes and tightened her grip on the woodwork. Lalna's eyes narrowed, suddenly sharp.

“They're _part_ of it; that's not the same. He never – he wouldn't tell me what happened.” He stopped, tugging idly at his goggles and frowning. “What did he expect me to do?”

“Maybe not rip flippin' great holes in the sky?”

“That wasn't me. Technically.” He didn't meet her gaze this time, and Zoey sighed. She suddenly felt very tired, particularly of this stupid, circular conversation.

“Just... go away, Lalna,” she said, stepping back towards the castle doors. “I really don't want your box of things, and I don't think - ”

“ _Please_ , Zoey.”

This time, the words did have impact, jolting surprise like a bolt of electricity through her, and Zoey turned back. Lalna was still standing, but for a moment he looked almost smaller, hunched into himself with a strange, hollow look on his pale face. He gripped his own elbows tightly, lips pressed into a thin line.

“Please,” he repeated. “I don't care what you do with it. Burn it, if you want. I just – I need the... insurance.”

Zoey blinked, first at him, then at the box.

“Against what?”

“Me.” A cold smile crept onto his face, but the expression didn't reach his eyes. Those were still blank and – now she looked more closely, in her own surprise – a little red at the edges. “I'll do it again,” he said, softly, and swallowed. “I always do – and I really can't, with this.”

The moment held – stretched out under the dreadful tension of so many possible futures, piling up against the mere seconds until everything seemed to creak under the weight of chances not yet taken – and Zoey broke it first.

“...alright.”

Lalna looked up, delight and disappointment fighting across his face, but he nodded, tightly.

“Thank you. I'm - ” he hesitated, chewing at his lip. “I could just say it, I suppose – I - ”

“Ohgosh, just _go away_ already,” Zoey snapped, and the scientist stopped. His gaze tracked over to the box again, then he rose into the air, pulling his goggles back down as he swivelled round – and was gone. Zoey watched the rapidly-shrinking figure until it vanished behind distant and trees, and sagged.

Right. Good. Well, not exactly good, but could have been worse. Probably.

She stooped down and picked up the box. It was heavier than it appeared, and glass clinked loudly inside as she moved, lugging the thing inside before finally plonking it down on the pool table. Her fingers hesitated over the squared-off cardboard lip, and she peered at the top layer of paper, covered in neat columns of tight scrawl.

 _I'll do it again_.

She had quite liked Lalna, once. He had seemed nice enough; hesitant, maybe, and a little crazy in his own way, with a gleam in his eyes as he talked of his technology. It had been reassuring at first, the casual ease that he had linked both sides of their shared interests – where she had only seen raw dislike before – and his grinning, idle generosity with drink and lasers. And then a few short hours later she had watched, horrified and hidden, as that same technology had Rythian pinned under a red-threaded forcefield, the same soft voice she had joked with brightly describing the _precautions_ hidden beneath Blackrock's foundations.

If thatwas his idea of insurance – she really didn't want to be it, this time.

Slowly, she began to empty the box. The thick stacks of written paperwork gave way to computer print-out, heavily annotated, and pages dislodged from the piles as she set them aside, spilling notes and scrawled diagrams onto the floor. She pulled out a few handfuls of discs, some labelled, many not, and moved them away too, leaving only the less-familiar shapes at the bottom. There were several glass tubes, stoppered, sealed and labelled 'Subject3', which seemed at first to be full of tar, but the liquid crawled suddenly up the sides of the glass when she touched it and she put it down again quickly.

Then there was the jar. It was a large jam jar, as far as she could tell, hand-labelled and bound closed with several layers of electrical tape so old it crackled under her fingers as she picked it up and peered inside. The inner surface was smeared with something half-dried, a peculiar greenish colour, but there was a shape behind the occlusion, and she tilted the jar, shaking it gently. She couldn't restrain a yelp of disgust as the thing dislodged, pressing up against the glass in sudden, unpleasant clarity. It was an eye – or something very like one - the size of a clenched fist, and could have been made of weirdly-veined onyx if it hadn't been visibly sagging against the glass. The pupil of the thing was tiny, drawn closed like a puckered wound, but twitched slightly as she watched and she quickly put it back in the box, trying to repress a wave of sudden nausea.

She recognised the handwriting on the label, even if the words were unclear now, smudged with water and dust. It wasn't Lalna's. Half-moon copies of her own reflection looked warily up at her from the slipped stack of discs as she took a step back, and her thoughts flicked – just for a moment – down towards the digital underbelly of the castle. She had repaired a lot of the damaged computers by now, so finding something to read the discs wouldn't be hard...

There was the faint scrape of claws on stone from behind her, and Zoey turned quickly – glad of the interruption – as Tee ducked round the doorframe, turning back and forth as he looked at the paperwork piles that covered the table. The dinosaur never had much in the way of facial expressions, but he dipped his head and snorted, his lips curling back slightly over sharpened teeth.

“I know, right?” Zoey muttered, as she edged back towards the mess. She picked up a few of the fallen sheets, her gaze tracking back over the old paper, and she couldn't help but notice a few more corrections, a couple of other jotted-out sentences in that familiar hand.

 _What did he expect me to do?_ Lalna's words hung in the air, weighing against her; the paper crumpled under her fingers and she tried to push away the lump in her throat. They stood in silence, staring – unseeing – at the tabletop mess, while chance and challenge danced in the air, and Zoey let out a long, shaking breath.

“Can you give me a hand, Tee? Um, I mean, if you can do paper?”

They piled everything back in – a little perforated by Tee's claws – and Zoey set the unpleasant jar on top, as she hauled the box back into her arms and made her slightly-unbalanced way towards the magic room. Heat burned at the sides of her eyes, vision blurring a little as she finally set it all down again, and she tugged the condenser lid open. Blue-white brilliance rose up like a fine fog, curling around the edges of the cool metal frame, and Zoey reached down to pick up the jar, holding it out over the indistinct, shimmering heart of the apparatus.

 _Keep going. Keep them safe. I'll come back_.

“I... miss you, Rythian,” she said, quietly. “And, this is... your thing, right, and you're sorting it. Ninety-percent sure you can. Ninety-nine percent. And a bit.”

She let go. It should – she felt, somewhere right under her heart – have been more dramatic, but the jar didn't even have time to tumble before it vanished into the thaumic plasma with barely a ripple, and the little red bar on the lid jerked fuller by a couple of inches. Zoey grabbed another handful of paper, and another, and another – Tee managing a few awkwardly-held stacks of discs – all instantly devoured by the alchemical brilliance, until little spots of after-image danced across her wet-blurred vision, and her fingers closed on nothing else but empty air. Tee neatly shredded the box in half, and they stuffed that in too.

Zoey drew her bare hand across her face and gulped, trying to get her breathing back under control as she tightened her grip on the condenser lid.

“Ninety percent sure,” she repeated, and a wobbly grin found her lips. “But if you don't, right – if you _don't_ – I'm coming after you. And I don't need Lalna's pity-help, or old doodles of stuff that didn't work, and I don't care if there's some Enderbabe in my way. I'll _hack_ it, if I have to. That's just how it's gonna be.”

She closed the lid.

Every end was a beginning, somewhere.  And Operation: Enderday had a good ring to it.

 

-end-

 

 

Aand that's it!

Thanks for sticking with me - and if you have any comments, I'd love to hear them. If people have had even slightly as much fun reading this as I've had writing it (and boring my housemates sideways), then I'm delighted. :)

(Extra note that didn't make it in – Zylus and Daltos? They're fine. Ended up spending the entire situation in the pool. It was very awkward.

And Sips keeps the cane, which is possibly the most tasteless stick of monogrammed bling that has ever been created.)


End file.
